---
title: "Building a design system specced for engineers and agents—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog"
url: https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-design-system-specced-for-engineers-and-agents-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-bl-crevtja50
source_url: https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/building-a-design-system-specced-for-engineers-and-agents
type: article
source: "Martian Chronicles"
published: 2026-06-17T17:18:25.059Z
updated: 2026-06-18T14:20:03.771Z
tags: ["webdev", "ui-design", "figma", "ai-assisted-development", "storybook"]
reading_time: 10
upvotes: 19
comments: 1
language: en
---

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# Building a design system specced for engineers and agents—Martian Chronicles, Evil Martians’ team blog

**[Martian Chronicles](https://daily.dev/sources/evilmartians)** · 10 min read · 19 upvotes · 1 comments

## Summary

Evil Martians built a design system for Currents, a test observability platform, in seven weeks using AI-assisted workflows. The project started with an LLM-accelerated audit of 791 files revealing 236 unique colors, two competing font systems, and inconsistent icon usage. The resulting design system covers typography (Innovator Grotesk with six sizes and five token groups), icons (Figura One with a 90% AI-mapped migration table), and colors (1,413 usages collapsed into four OKLCH-based token groups). A key design goal was making the system readable by both engineers and AI coding agents — OKLCH color definitions allow agents to extend the palette predictably, and token naming eliminates ambiguity. The system lives in Figma, Storybook, and GitHub. The post also outlines three signals that indicate a team needs a design system, particularly relevant for lean engineering teams using LLMs for code generation.

## Full article

daily.dev links to this article rather than hosting it. Read it at the original source: <https://evilmartians.com/chronicles/building-a-design-system-specced-for-engineers-and-agents>

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---

Tags: [#webdev](https://daily.dev/tags/webdev), [#ui-design](https://daily.dev/tags/ui-design), [#figma](https://daily.dev/tags/figma), [#ai-assisted-development](https://daily.dev/tags/ai-assisted-development), [#storybook](https://daily.dev/tags/storybook)

[View this post on daily.dev](https://daily.dev/posts/building-a-design-system-specced-for-engineers-and-agents-martian-chronicles-evil-martians-team-bl-crevtja50)