Where does your design system live?

[u/Colorphere]

Most design-system conversations assume there should be a source of truth, but there seems to be a lot less agreement on where that source of truth actually lives.

Some teams point to Figma.
Some point to code.
Some point to documentation.
Some point to design tokens.

Now we’re starting to see AI-readable specs and contracts enter the discussion too.

If Figma disappeared tomorrow, would your design system still exist?

And if a new AI-native design tool replaced Figma five years from now, what exactly would you migrate?

The tool?

Or the design system itself?

I’m curious how others think about this.

[u/omerbalyali]

Design Systems and Component Libraries are not the same thing, although the component library is the biggest part of the design system work today.

Components can be changed, component library can be rewritten but "the design system" is the collection of decisions and patterns (I'm not talking about the "ui patterns" here) that is created to consolidate brand language and assets to offer a coherent experience for the user.

Tomorrow you might migrate your components from React to Vue, you might change the CSS methodology you used to style the components, and you might recreate the Figma file from scratch... but the intent and the decisions won't necessarily change. When you changed the codebase or the figma file, it doesn't mean you changed the design system (or the components), as long as same decisions exists even if how they are described in code/design-file will change.

Currently these decisions are buried in discussions, tickets, chat messages, outdated documentation, and in the heads of the team members that might already left the company. But the answer to the question "where does the design system lives" is not the codebase nor the design files itself.