chore: retire the Design project bridge — UDG is the whole system #145

Merged

peterswimm merged 1 commit from chore/retire-designsync into main

2026-09-15 16:27:00 +00:00

peterswimm commented

2026-09-15 16:24:55 +00:00

Owner

The claude.ai Design project had become a one-way mirror of values this repo already held.

Its original authored superset — components, ui_kits, themes, assets, work this repo could not reproduce — was lost on 2026-06-27 and never came back. What remained were tokens-only bundles assembled from dist/ and sent out to six per-product projects, so the bridge carried nothing the generators had not just produced. It also cost something to keep: an interactive claude.ai login, usable in a main session only, unreachable from CI or any headless run, and a second front door onto one source of truth.

UDG already ships everything a designer needs to work from, and just build emits all of it:

surface	what it is
`dist/<product>/artifact.html`	the themed, tabbed board — Flutter, Swift, CLI and WordPress against real token values
`dist/<product>/{skin.css, tokens.dtcg.json}`	the token layer every consumer reads
`artifact.{docx,pptx,pdf}`, `template.{dotx,potx}`	the document exports
`diagrams/*.svg`, `docs/brand-guide.html`	the diagram and guide surfaces

Scope

Removes .design-sync/ — assemble.mjs, config.json, both conventions.<product>.md, NOTES.md, the staged colours. Its config.json also named a package-validate.mjs gate that is not in this repo, so that dangling reference goes too.
Drops the ds-bundle/ ignore rule, since nothing produces that output any more.
Rewrites CLAUDE.md's bridge section as a short statement of where design surfaces come from, and corrects the cross-reference above it that called the build tool one of two front doors.
CONTRIBUTING.md no longer routes ville's work through the bridge — it arrives as assets or review notes, then a PR, which is how #141's icon bundle actually landed.

Nothing else referenced it: no justfile target, no CI workflow, no repo-local skill.

Testing

extract.py check --all clean (dist/ still matches the token sources), build_surfaces.py check clean, 183 generator tests pass. Confirmed the only surviving mention of the bridge in the repo is the sentence recording that it was retired.

Impact Statement

Documentation and dead tooling only — no token value, generated artifact, theme or site output changes, and just build / just check behave exactly as before. The practical effect is that the design system has one front door instead of two, and no part of it now depends on an interactive login that CI could never perform.

Two follow-ups for you, both outside this repo:

Deleting the projects in claude.ai is manual. For the record, since the config file held them: toilville d7b92641, rituals 2a3ccfe5, fux-capacity 54fb2a26, spelwork c155e615, tctd 7024e6e0, peterswimm 3710c2f9, and the lost superset fd8f75a0.
Your local checkout keeps two untracked .design-sync/fonts/DM-Mono-*.woff2 files after this merges. They are the font already retired in favour of the system monospace stack, so they can go.

The claude.ai Design project had become a one-way mirror of values this repo already held. Its original authored superset — components, ui_kits, themes, assets, work this repo could not reproduce — was lost on **2026-06-27** and never came back. What remained were tokens-only bundles assembled from `dist/` and sent out to six per-product projects, so the bridge carried nothing the generators had not just produced. It also cost something to keep: an interactive claude.ai login, usable in a main session only, unreachable from CI or any headless run, and a second front door onto one source of truth. UDG already ships everything a designer needs to work from, and `just build` emits all of it: | surface | what it is | |---|---| | `dist/<product>/artifact.html` | the themed, tabbed board — Flutter, Swift, CLI and WordPress against real token values | | `dist/<product>/{skin.css, tokens.dtcg.json}` | the token layer every consumer reads | | `artifact.{docx,pptx,pdf}`, `template.{dotx,potx}` | the document exports | | `diagrams/*.svg`, `docs/brand-guide.html` | the diagram and guide surfaces | ## Scope - Removes `.design-sync/` — `assemble.mjs`, `config.json`, both `conventions.<product>.md`, `NOTES.md`, the staged colours. Its `config.json` also named a `package-validate.mjs` gate that is not in this repo, so that dangling reference goes too. - Drops the `ds-bundle/` ignore rule, since nothing produces that output any more. - Rewrites CLAUDE.md's bridge section as a short statement of where design surfaces come from, and corrects the cross-reference above it that called the build tool one of two front doors. - CONTRIBUTING.md no longer routes ville's work through the bridge — it arrives as assets or review notes, then a PR, which is how #141's icon bundle actually landed. Nothing else referenced it: no justfile target, no CI workflow, no repo-local skill. ## Testing `extract.py check --all` clean (dist/ still matches the token sources), `build_surfaces.py check` clean, 183 generator tests pass. Confirmed the only surviving mention of the bridge in the repo is the sentence recording that it was retired. ## Impact Statement Documentation and dead tooling only — no token value, generated artifact, theme or site output changes, and `just build` / `just check` behave exactly as before. The practical effect is that the design system has one front door instead of two, and no part of it now depends on an interactive login that CI could never perform. Two follow-ups for you, both outside this repo: - **Deleting the projects in claude.ai is manual.** For the record, since the config file held them: toilville `d7b92641`, rituals `2a3ccfe5`, fux-capacity `54fb2a26`, spelwork `c155e615`, tctd `7024e6e0`, peterswimm `3710c2f9`, and the lost superset `fd8f75a0`. - Your local checkout keeps two untracked `.design-sync/fonts/DM-Mono-*.woff2` files after this merges. They are the font already retired in favour of the system monospace stack, so they can go.

peterswimm added 1 commit

2026-09-15 16:24:55 +00:00

chore: retire the Design project bridge — UDG is the whole system

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5f3db85ec4

The claude.ai Design project had become a one-way mirror of values this
repo already held. Its original authored superset — components, ui_kits,
themes, assets, work this repo could not reproduce — was lost on
2026-06-27 and never came back. What remained were tokens-only bundles
assembled from dist/ and sent to six per-product projects, so the bridge
carried nothing the generators had not just produced.

It also cost something to keep: an interactive claude.ai login, usable in
a main session only, unreachable from CI or any headless run, and a second
front door onto one source of truth.

So the surfaces a designer works from are the ones `just build` already
emits — artifact.html across all four destinations, the skin and token
files, the document exports, the diagrams and the brand guide.

Removed: .design-sync/ (assemble.mjs, config.json, the two conventions
files, NOTES.md, the staged colours), the ds-bundle build-output ignore
rule, and the CLAUDE.md and CONTRIBUTING.md prose describing the bridge.
config.json also named a package-validate.mjs gate that is not in this
repo, so that reference goes with it.

For the record, since the config file held them: the retired project ids
were toilville d7b92641, rituals 2a3ccfe5, fux-capacity 54fb2a26,
spelwork c155e615, tctd 7024e6e0, peterswimm 3710c2f9, and the lost
superset fd8f75a0. Deleting them in claude.ai is a separate, manual step.

Verified: dist/ still matches the token sources, surface artifacts are in
sync, and the 183 generator tests pass.

peterswimm merged commit a7ab4da8e8 into main

2026-09-15 16:27:00 +00:00

peterswimm deleted branch chore/retire-designsync

2026-09-15 16:27:00 +00:00

peterswimm referenced this pull request from a commit

2026-09-15 16:27:01 +00:00

Merge pull request 'chore: retire the Design project bridge — UDG is the whole system' (#145) from chore/retire-designsync into main

peterswimm referenced this pull request

2026-09-15 16:51:35 +00:00

chore(dist): drop artifact-phone.html, output nothing emits any more #146