iiinova — where your digital self keeps evolving

Reposted by mbtar

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Claude Code follows my instructions in agent.md and skill.md files to the T. I barely need to prompt it back.

A meme inspired by the famous hose scene from Silence of the Lambs, depicting a designer using Claude Code.
The Designer, as the serial killer Buffalo Bill, instructs: "It places the atom in the molecule and it uses my tokens and not tailwind, or else it gets the hose again".
Claude Code, as the victim, applies a color from the red primitive palette instead of a theme color.
The Designer reacts "Don't use the primitives! How dare you"

021

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Claude Code follows my instructions in agent.md and skill.md files to the T. I barely need to prompt it back.

021

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

My Claude Code sessions to build the 'Design System Dev tool' are going well

130

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I can't decide if it illustrates investors lack of knowledge of current techs or the industry disdain of designers. Anyway, I'll give Stitch another try. Wasn't impressed last year. What do I know, maybe now it produces natively better design outputs than a babysat CC.

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

"use the new DESIGN.md — an agent-friendly markdown file — to export or import your design rules to or from other design and coding tools." So Figma stock is dropping because Google added the most basic agent setup as their grandiose feature?

220

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I heard thought experiments about going back to IRC servers, invitation-only.

020

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

If you're asked to do this, remember: as salaried workers, we sell our labour-power to companies. The value of that labour lies not in the output but in our knowledge and expertise. Do not give it away, especially not for free.

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

And for UX/UI/Product designers it's even worse, there is no industry-wide standards, every team has its own rules and on top of that it's region/language-centric. So I'm hearing stories of Designers being asked to write up their methodologies in company files to "align expertise"...

120

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I've been experimenting with LLMs and agents for a year now and it's still so bad on real-life design work... But it makes sense when you think about it: models are trained on corpus. There a ton of tech documentation available online but not so much on *how* people actually work, how they think.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Unfortunately for them, LLMs still have no intelligence and no understanding of what users need nor what it is building. These tools can be guided to an extent if we put efforts to instruct agents on how to work exactly like us, but that's the trap: we need to give away our personal methodologies.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Haha. What I'm seeing is decision-makers trying (yet again) to take away agency from crafts people. Tools being built to remove us from the equation altogether with the goal of offloading PMs with the work of their entire tech department.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

And not to be *that* annoying designer, but if you have to show users what to do with your product, not only the user experience isn't good, but the value prop is either not communicated properly or absent.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Every time I have to re-explain "UI ≠ screen"... But more than that, the big problem with "chatbot interface" is that it hides possibilities. Users have no idea what they can do because it's invisible, they have to query it first. This is exactly why LLMs are now suggesting prompt examples.

110

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

At the end of the day, all of our AI projects are very likely already subject to that. The least risky option is local models, but I'm not sure about the licensing of each open-source models for commercial use.

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

I heard a similar story a while ago with OpenAi: they're planning to take a cut from your revenues if the work was done using their stack.

forbes.com

Does AI Want Your Revenue, Too?

As the AI giants seek to recoup their trillion-dollar investments, will they come for a share of your revenue?

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 19/03/2026

Isn't impressions visibility and not engagement? To reach such a drastic difference in such a short time, I'm skeptical it's "merely" gender-coded language and user-based discrimination. The algorithm may favor some kind of posts because it performs well but the gender setting has to play a role...

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 18/03/2026

I’ve been testing Cursor last week and my conclusion is that I still prefer VS code + CC CLI. CC is elegant. Yes the UI is ugly. I mean functional elegance. You can run the entire thing with md files and commands. There’s no settings to look for in badly-designed menus with unclear back navigation.

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

3/ I wonder how many of workflows nudged by the way Figma is designed actually translate to front-end best practices. Matrioshka nested instances are really useful to designers to quickly create modules in screens, but I have a feeling it might over-engineer development...

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

2/ I optimized the file to minimize the amount of components variants thanks to nested instance properties, but now I'm not sure what CC would generate, I think in practice I'd need to work on the component logic

Screenshot from Figma displaying two use of the List organism.
On the left, the list organism used as a single card to display transactions in a mobile app.
On the right, the list organism used as several list menus in settings.
One of the list organism from the list menu version is selected: on the figma sidebar, a long list of properties are displayed, showing nested instance properties.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I know it's a useless thought and it's ok to label it a "molecule", but at the scale of a Design System, it can quickly become overwhelming and discourage users to dev their DS. I already feel too lazy to go through it, and it's a DS I made in 2 days. The final test is the starter kit we use at work

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

1/ Now I'm experiencing the most annoying debate in DS circles: what counts as an atom, molecule or an organism? See the .ListItem in the image: it nests an avatar and a CTA, so it should be a molecule, but it cannot exists on its own, in practice I would use the organism with only one item

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

In practice, my solution was to direct users to order child components in "Atoms", "Molecules" and "Organisms" sections and select the section so it's visible with the MCP. But now that I'm testing it with a DS I created for this project, I'm faced a few problems:

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

A point of failure when generating the dev of a Design System would be developing components in random order. If it devs first a list organism, it will return an error because the nested components don't exist yet. So I was thinking of a strict atomic design approach: Atoms > Molecules > Organisms

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Experiment feedback: Figma API REST return raw values and not alias tokens (unless you have the expensive enterprise plan IIRC) So instead of getting “color.background.inverse”=“neutral.1000”, I got “color.background.inverse”=“#000” The MCP get_variables tool does return tokens as values though.

010

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

It’s not a blocker for now because I can still run tests and improve the guidance, but at some point I’ll have to find a clean solution.

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

My big issue atm the moment is the “download”: for now it’s a npm symlink in local. Tech-wise the easiest would be npm package but it requires the terminal and it’s very intimidating for non-tech people. An alternative would be gh clone… but it’s still in the terminal.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Oh I got lost in details, basically users run skills: one to init the project, another to build the design system and a few others to add new tokens/components. CC ask for a few questions and links and that’s it.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

In any case, I say it’s easier but the real test will be when I put the laptop in front of users. At first I wanted CC to explain what it did to help designers learn, but it talks way too much, so it instructed it to only surface tech details when an action from the user is needed to fix an error

000

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Originally I had setup a full automated workflow with GitHub to create issue, branch, PR, code checks (only me merge) but when I explained it to my design coworkers, they blanked. I still think code management is cleaner but it’s not mandatory now.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Great question! I’ve been designing the system under the hood with interactive Q/A in Claude Desktop and a lot of guidance. A big part is anticipating the proper build order to minimise errors: tokens > text styles > icons > atoms > etc. I also added mini-tutos to import tokens from Tokens Studio.

100

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

Tomorrow I'll finally be able to test out the actual Tester Design System I created in Figma 2 weeks weeks ago. I've been monitoring tokens usage like crazy... A code quality audit and BAM! 10% of the weekly CC usage. Good lesson on dev best practices: keep your files lean & separated by functions.

010

mbtar @mbtar.bsky.social · 14/03/2026

I've been building an automated workflow to develop custom design systems through the Figma MCP. Target users are designers, not dev, so it needs to run as simply as possible from Claude Code Desktop. It's working ~~~

A screenshot of a Claude Clode Desktop window. Claude Code is reporting that a component has been developed.

A rendering of a "get started" button in localhost browser.

280