TIL my old token naming was the real problem, not the team

I used to fight for semantic names like color-brand-primary and spent a week debating with developers in Austin about it. Then we switched to plain numbers like gray-500 and spacing-4, and suddenly everyone stopped guessing. Maybe it's just me, but the old way felt more human until I saw how fast our QA caught mismatches. Has anyone else found that boring, generic naming actually helps non-designers use the system better?

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fiona_murray4d ago

Boring names win because they remove the guesswork. But the real fix wasn't the numbers, it was that you stopped pretending the names had to describe the whole system. gray-500 only works because everyone agrees gray-400 is lighter and gray-600 is darker. Color-brand-primary left too much room for interpretation in a code review. The devs in Austin weren't wrong, they just needed something they could scan in two seconds without asking questions. Once you treat the name as a map key instead of a story, the system gets easier for everyone.

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