Context-Based Design Systems, Revisited

A year into the AI-driven design systems era, the framework holds up. Here's what's changed, what's clearer, and why context still beats autonomy.

A while back, I wrote about a workflow we were starting to call Context-Based Design Systems. The idea was simple in principle and harder in practice. If you let context flow through every phase of the product lifecycle, each step gets smarter than the one before it. Design informs code. Code informs documentation. Documentation informs the next round o…