Audit design system — Nayara Marques

Audit design system

Is AI following your design system?

An agent builds from what your system gives it. Where it is clear, the agent reuses your parts. Where it is not, it guesses: raw values, rebuilt components, parts nobody asked for. The audit shows where AI follows your system, where it invents, and what each gap costs.

For teams with a design system in code. No system yet: I build it from scratch.

Why now

If AI writes your UI, your design system is the budget

When components and tokens are reachable, an agent writes less, reuses more and needs fewer corrections. When they are not, you pay for every guess in tokens, review and rework.

Result · my own site, measured

  • ~2,300 tokenssaved on one screen

44% shorter: the same case-study screen is 21,229 characters written raw and 11,961 built from components.

The cost of drift

Every value an agent guesses, you pay for twice

Once when it is written, again when someone catches it in review. Drift is a throughput problem, not a tidiness one.

  • Tokens

    Raw values are long

    A component call is one line. The same part by hand is forty, and you pay for all forty every time.

  • Review

    Guesses land on a person

    An off-scale value looks right and reads wrong. Catching and fixing it costs more than generating it.

  • Consistency

    Near-misses ship

    Nine near-identical greys. A button rebuilt because the real one was hard to find. Nothing fails a test; the product feels loose.

  • Accessibility

    Conditions slip quietly

    Contrast below the minimum, motion that ignores the reduced-motion setting. Nobody notices until someone cannot use the screen.

What the audit checks

Five pillars, one report

They answer three questions: how AI reads your system, whether it follows it, and what it does when something is missing. Tested on Primer, Radix Themes, Carbon and Chakra UI: every one had findings worth fixing.

  1. Values

    Every hard-coded value in your components, checked against your tokens: equal to a token nobody found, or on no scale. Plus unused and duplicate tokens.

  2. People

    Contrast on every declared pair, in every theme. Reduced motion, high contrast, visible focus, and right-to-left if you need it.

  3. Structure

    Components rebuilt by hand, parts used outside their contract, styling that changes what a component is.

  4. Content

    Unsourced numbers and claims, and words your voice rules ban. An agent repeats what the system teaches it.

  5. Agent readiness

    What a coding agent has to invent: decisions it made up, and names it expected but could not find.

What the audit finds

Four kinds of finding, and only two are mechanical

Each costs something different to fix.

  • Mechanical

    A value that equals a token

    The decision exists; someone typed the number. Find, replace, and prove with a before-and-after render that nothing moved.

  • Needs a decision

    A value on no scale

    An optical nudge or drift: only your team can say. Grouped by where they cluster, so deciding takes minutes.

  • Affects people

    Contrast and motion

    Contrast in every theme, and motion against the reduced-motion setting. Teams fix these first.

  • Getting worse

    What AI invents

    A coding agent fills gaps by guessing. The audit shows what it made up and what it could not find.

The audit

Two audits a month

5 days

From the day access arrives. Fixed scope.

What is included

  • Drift list, contrast report, conditions check
  • Fixes ranked by cost and gain
  • A 30-minute call
  • React, CSS, Sass or CSS-in-JS

What is not

  • Fixing the drift. If you want that, it becomes a project engagement.

Questions

What teams ask before booking

Our system is in Figma, not in code.

Then the audit compares the design file with what ships. Tell me what you have and I will say what the report can cover.

We use Storybook. Does this replace it?

No, it runs on top. Storybook shows each component works; the audit checks whether screens built with it follow the system, plus contrast, reduced motion and high contrast.

Can you sign an NDA, or work from an export?

Yes to both. Without repository access, an export of the design system and a few product screens is enough for the drift list.

What if the audit finds very little?

Then the report says so and names what it checked. The four public systems all scored high on tokens and still had findings worth fixing.

Who does the work?

I do. The scan is automated. I check every finding by hand, because scans are wrong often enough to matter, then rank the fixes and write the report.

Nayara Marques

Who runs it

I design systems, and I ship them

Nine years designing products, lately also writing the code. Based in Barcelona, on US East Coast hours. Fintech, logistics and energy, from a seed startup to one of Latin America's largest investment banks.

I built the design system for an AI platform in private capital markets, in Claude Design: 48 components, 9 templates, tokens as the single source of truth, validation that catches AI drift. The audit is that method, applied to your system.

See the work

Is AI following your design system?

The audit shows where AI follows your system, where it invents, and what each gap costs.

Book an audit