Lion Blau
Mining the System
A field manual for design systems in the AI era
How to extract a design system out of a product you've already shipped — structuring it, exporting it to code, documenting it, and making it readable by the machines now building with it.
27 pages · Free, no signup · August 2026
Mining the System
27 pages · Free, no signup · Updated August 2026
A field manual for design systems in the AI era
What's inside
Auditing a live product and harvesting its real values from production. Building the two-layer token structure in Figma — primitives, semantic aliases, modes. Components, variants and full state sets. Publishing the library. The token pipeline into your repo. Per-component documentation and accessibility. Handover. A second volume — on running the finished system as the substrate for AI-assisted building — is in progress and will be linked here once it's out.
Comes with Quarry
A free Figma plugin, built alongside the manual and used throughout it. Quarry reads every colour in a file — including the ones you can't select by clicking: mixed text ranges, gradient stops, shadow colours, hidden layers, fills already bound to a variable. Then it imports a curated token JSON as real variables and aliases, builds your spacing and radius scale, and binds screens you already shipped to it.
It automates the harvest, never the adjudication. Which values survive, what they're called, and what the system should enforce stay yours — the plugin just makes sure you're deciding against the complete set rather than a sample of it. Runs entirely inside Figma. No network access, deletes nothing, reverses with one undo.
Get Quarry on Figma Community →
I build, mine, and rebuild design systems — audit through to handover.
