iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/05/2026

👋 you know I hadn’t even considered this through the lens of AI but it’s scary how relevant it feels now

Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 04/05/2026

Not sure if there’s even a difference anymore. I’ve been staring at this stuff for a stupid amount of time and I could not tell whatsoevrr

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 04/05/2026

Amazing, thank you! I also love how that answer is the same answer for 90% of this stuff and I’m always overthinking it.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 03/05/2026

How are you making these graphics? They look amazing and consistent across your other posts. Huge fan Also 10 billion percent. Your session transcripts are worth their weight in gold. github.com/markacianfrani/devlog getting your eng org to centralize them is the biggest ROI

github.com

GitHub - markacianfrani/devlog

Contribute to markacianfrani/devlog development by creating an account on GitHub.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/03/2026

One good design token can save you from shipping 50mb of javascript slop. open.substack.com/pub/markacia...

open.substack.com

Using LLMs to Dogfood Your Design Tokens

or the case for ending component libraries

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 07/03/2026

Does this just all work out of the box bc html?

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 27/02/2026

I just one person at my company to tell me about what new css stuff I can use and let me have the joy of ripping out abomination. What job title is that? Keeper of knowledge?

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 13/01/2026

I feel exactly the same way so. Lmk if I lost you at any point and I’ll add more deets. I 1. couldn’t tell if this would be useful to anyone other than myself 2. Assumed there was some other thing I wasn’t using that everyone else was

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 12/01/2026

I’m still waiting for approval to try that extension but ask the dingus if it can execute JavaScript and if it can, it should totally work. I reallllly wish you didn’t need to use the terminal for this. The Claude code UI in the app is real good now tho

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 12/01/2026

Phew I was afraid I glazed over the details a bit. Can’t wait to see what you do with this

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 11/01/2026

what if the Figma MCP wasn't actually useless and let you write to your Figma files? (its easy) cianfrani.dev/posts/a-bett...

cianfrani.dev

A Better Figma MCP or How To Let Claude Design

The one where we give Claude access to the Figma API

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/01/2026

MCP UI. UI is largely dead. I haven’t logged into Jira all year. I’m not clicking your 4 page form anymore. Time to invent new maths

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 04/01/2026

I am so sick of reading AI-generated content. cianfrani.dev/posts/geneti...

cianfrani.dev

Genetic Diversity

Tired of reading AI-generated

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 06/12/2025

Literally, just let designers design and then throw an LLM to pattern match what colors actually get used and smooth any inconsistency.

Claude code asking about semantic intent wrt color usage

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 29/11/2025

Big time! Or curating your own pattern language. I also think most big companies prior art is actually a net negative so independent has a crazy advantage here in some respect

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 29/11/2025

I don’t have a good practical answer though. I literally just slap its hand over and over until the codebase reaches critical mass and can give enough prior art that it usually stops doing the thing. If it’s really bad I’ll bake it into a /review command

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 29/11/2025

Does it know that 🤔? Im definitely guilty of not following best practices when prototyping and abuse globalThis. Just kidding, that’s giving Claude too much credit.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 28/11/2025

how big is the repo/project?

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 28/11/2025

Keep playing with this and you’ll see how 20 good tokens and some well crafted MCP will steamroll all these component libraries everyone built last year. Jk. AI bad.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 28/11/2025

Tools like CC will now send up an accepts text/markdown header jawn that you can respect and just send markdown down the wire. Other clients like opencode will just say fuck it and convert every webfetch to markdown. Storybook is embarrassing and their first MCP was actually a joke I think.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 26/11/2025

Nuxt isn’t React but 10/10

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 26/11/2025

For real. Love the space ghost. I thought it was just gonna be like a zoom call

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 26/11/2025

I’ve never been more sold to. Also holy shit the production on this is 🤌

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 04/11/2025

New global design system just dropped. If I see one more <SlopCard> I’m gonna lose it.

An AI generated card component with a left border width that’s also rounded.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 02/11/2025

Would love to know the postmortem. Is it still getting used? what’s more popular tokens or components?

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

Copy the tokens and give it a link to the spec and be like “what’re the parts that are useful for us and then explain to me what any of this shit means”

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

But I am genuinely grateful for The Spec and very happy to finally breathe.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

And. I just read a thing where Atlassian said they were, until v recently, just copy and pasting json into figma and auditing tokens that way? So like none of this shit really matters.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

I still think just having a bunch of json files is fine. “Combotoriallaial explosion” isn’t in my vocabulary.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

Like you have Brand A and Brand B jawns (modifiers? Idk) but you also want to have a fixed typography jawn and a fluid typography jawn.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 01/11/2025

after having The Thing explain to me what “orthogonal” means like I’m six years old, I think I finally get it and the design token resolver spec is kind of cool, tho unnecessarily gate kept by jargon.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 27/09/2025

My god you nailed it. Just let designers design.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 15/09/2025

The docs: “accessible checkbox adheres to the WAI ARIA checkbox pattern so you know it’s good. Definitely don’t check for yourself”

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 15/07/2025

“Doesn’t scale” is such a cop out reply. @stuffbreaker.bsky.social seriously huge props for trying to at least push this.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 14/07/2025

AI context is just a black and white mead composition book cianfrani.dev/posts/buildi...

cianfrani.dev

Building an AI Agent with Typescript

The one where I build an AI agent in typescript

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 28/06/2025

They need to come up with the right marketing name for it.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 27/06/2025

Documenting every single permutation of every component always felt redundant. If you have an input component, you can easily guess what the textarea will look like. Future of DS/AI is patterns. No need to waste context.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 14/06/2025

Who said we shouldn’t put jokes in our code? Or was that the joke

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/06/2025

….brb launching my new startup

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/06/2025

Idk maybe like salesforce and GitHub scale orgs tie your performance evaluations into how much you misuse the design system so this isn’t a problem for most people

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/06/2025

Same but my god the shit I’ve seen people (myself included) do. The _doesn’t mean shit. Emoji all the way. I don’t think people care if it’s internal if it works. People will probably stumble upon the private var via dev tools, likely frustrated already.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 07/06/2025

I’m convinced the overlap of people that use angular and people that use web components is exactly 8 people.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 23/05/2025

Idk if I were a manager id give everyone like a week to do their own project, prototype something, let em pick the tech, not have to use react, sing the songs they want want to sing and then never talk about it.

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/05/2025

Need to make my own component library so I can name it cianfranui

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Mark Cianfrani @cianfrani.me · 08/05/2025

The aria label is so good. “Make it accessible”

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