Structure. Rules. Skills.
Structured context. MCP servers.
Connecting the brain to the arms.
Automating. Scaling.
That’s what I’m coding lately.✨
The design system as AI Infrastructure.
Every single day.
Feel like we’re finally building a living + breathing design system. ✨
It’s like we’re really elevating the cultural and operational infrastructure of a design system.
Using new paradigms to elevate those very difficult parts of scaling a system.
Governance.
Contribution.
Making it a better maker experience to contribute and evolve the system. ✨
Coding the infrastructure.
Automating the boundaries + governance of a conceptual model.
Codifying the underlying invisible parts.
The parts that I always asked myself:
✨ How do I multiply my thinking to others?
✨ How do I help them see what I see?
The familiar flow state feeling of coding.
Being in the zone. Feeling productive.
Bringing ideas to life again. 🌝✨
But this time is not just coding components, tokens, styles.
It’s codifying all the things I learned over the years.
For months, we were deep in Figma, rebuilding.
In November, we started using Cursor.
It’s hard to explain how I have been feeling,
The feeling of returning back into the familiar space of coding in an IDE.
Surprisingly, not feeling as behind as I had feared before.
A year ago, I joined Snowflake. A design role again.
Throughout the 9 months of rebuilding of our design system, I did contribute though code in the same ways I did at Atlassian.
Defining ops.
Writing a lot of documentation.
Restructuring foundations.
The context.
When I joined Atlassian 7 years ago, I left my role as a design engineer.
I stopped coding in that role.
I had an entire fleet of amazing devs that could code better.
I embraced building new skills in system thinking + design strategy + leadership.
In the back of my mind, I always missed coding.
As I increase my AI literacy and speed up my personal workflows, I find myself both very satisfied but also aware that I need to protect my boundaries even more to prevent myself from overworking. Need to pace myself. 🥲
How did bufo find us @dbanks.design @hipstersmoothie.com 😂 so random
Today was a *high five* day for us! @hipstersmoothie.com + @dbanks.design
Team work makes the dream work!✨
When starting Reshaped, having a paid license kept me going but also felt wrong sometimes. I wanted to give back more to the community. After 5 years – it is finally happening. Reshaped React and Figma libraries are now open-source.
reshaped.so/blog/reshape...
Get the links below ✨
One of my favs!
Design system fam reunited at Figma Schema 2025
South Bay design systems fam reunited @ Figma Schema ✨✨✨
@ventrebleu.bsky.social @dbanks.design @kaelig.fr @jenyee.social
Thanks for the lovely day @figma.com!
Not yet! We shall see in the future, still have a lot of Marie Kondo to do
It’s been a challenging 10 months. Crafted a vision, grew a dream team, and we’re co-creating an ai-ready design system.
We introduced the next generation of our design system to the company last week + beginning to launch all the things this week. ❇️
I love this feeling. 🌚✨
Finally figured out my password 🤣
Meeee
