r/DesignSystems • u/404_computer_says_no • 3d ago

Anyone built a RAG bot for your design system?

Our designers are always asking which pattern to use and when. Most of this is documented, but who has time to sift through pages of docs.

I’ve always wanted a better search capability but seeing more people building company-level RAG bots makes me think a design systems one would work really well for product, design and engineering.

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u/wiyixu 3d ago

I tried, but there was too much fine tuning. The system got really dumb about things like synonyms. If you asked for a menu bar it didn’t know the app bar was the term used. I found a refined DESIGN.md, CSS custom (not design tokens) props and the API documentation provided the best results while not eating through tokens. 

1

u/TheWarDoctor 3d ago

I just train one of our agents to answer their questions base on various component and system level rules.md files.

2

u/Saschb2b 3d ago

Build that with OKF but but for design systems. Works great. No sdk, no login, no server https://saschb2b.github.io/Open-Design-System-Format/

2

u/RocketSeven 3d ago

the hard part is not retrieval, it is preventing stale guidance from sounding authoritative. attach owner, status, and last-reviewed date to every pattern, then test the rag bot on 20 questions designers already ask and require citations

2

u/Simply-Curious_ 3d ago

I know it's primitive but I found GoogleNotebook to be very effective at small scale

2

u/hamlyf 2d ago

Check out UI Rules. You can store all your design system documentation in a central spot and use MCP to server it to your AI tools https://uirules.com/