When is the last time you hand-designed a design system?
I'll call it, manually building out design systems in month-long efforts is dead.
We spent the past 10 years formalizing UI design into design systems.
(Sure, we sometimes went beyond UI, into brand, print etc.)
That's been great for users. Consistency and quality went up.
Design systems were manually built up by designers, often formalized into code, governance processes, you name it.
Meanwhile, engineers realized that with a great design system, they were unblocked from needing designers to make things look great.
ChadCN became the most popular design system out there. It's quite good.
It's 2026, AI is now good enough and:
It can formalize a pretty good design system out of some example designs you built, or an existing website. Or some screenshots.
It can customize a ChadCN base into a more custom design system.
It knows the elements of a design system, color systems, CTAs etc. And you can guide it.
With a little bit of guidance, it can output pretty much perfect standard screens within your design system.
So basically design systems work now. Once you have given your design enough thought, you can turn it into a system that actually works, without needing crazy amounts of effort, with a little help from LLMs. And implementation works, as in, LLMs are very good at using them.