Methodology
Why Arbor is built this way. Long-form essays on the architectural decisions, governance choices, and design principles behind Arbor.
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Why token review gates can't be symmetric
Design tokens flow both ways between Figma and code. The review gates that protect them look like mirror images but solve different problems — and treating them as one shape is how you lose primitives in production.
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Design literacy · Part 1 of 3 Design systems are older than software
Six inflection points from cave paintings to the telegraph. Each one solves a problem we think of as a design system problem — abstraction, coherence, distribution — centuries or millennia before we had software to solve it in.
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Pin to a process, not a version
A toolchain drifted eleven releases out of date while nobody was watching. The fix wasn't to upgrade — it was to make the drift visible at the start of every session.