Developer Reflects on Two and a Half Years Building a Design System That Never Scaled

A frontend developer spent roughly two and a half years, from spring 2022 to late 2024, building a design system at their organization, initially aimed at reducing duplicated code across multiple applications. The team chose Web Components over React for the component library, which introduced challenges such as Custom Element Registry conflicts in a monorepo environment. By early 2024, the project evolved into a task force effort to automate the translation of Figma designs into code using an intermediate representation called a Design Syntax Tree. The team also built a Figma plugin to bulk-generate design components, but it hit an unresolved memory or performance limitation within Figma itself, which Figma engineers ultimately confirmed was not caused by the plugin's code. The author reflects that building components alone is insufficient to sustain a design system, and that the project ultimately did not reach its intended scale despite years of technical investment.