Measuring How Well AI Coding Agents Keep Design Systems Consistent

A designer tested whether AI coding agents need a design system by giving one agent the same six-screen brief across three setups: no system, shadcn/ui, and a decided look with a thin system. Each build was measured in headless Chrome by counting button and field variants, values outside the scale, and one-off styles. On the first pass, all setups produced reasonably consistent interfaces, with no system performing close to the others. The author then changed the main color, corner radius and density in one place to see how far the change propagated. The results showed the first pass is the easy part, while the real value of a system lies in what happens afterward. The test was run on a fictional coffee roaster dashboard called Halden.
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