Design Tokens as AI Guardrails: Keeping AI-Generated Screens On-Brand
<p>The coding agents got good at layout. Ask Cursor, Claude Code, or Lovable for a pricing card and you get a recognisable, mostly-correct row of features with a button on the bottom — in about three seconds. The thing they're not good at is the part underneath: which blue, how much spacing, which grey for borders, what radius pairs with what shadow. They pick from an infinite palette and they pick badly.</p> <p>A constrained token set is the cheapest, most reliable guardrail you can put in fron
Story Overview
The coding agents got good at layout. Ask Cursor, Claude Code, or Lovable for a pricing card and you get a recognisable, mostly-correct row of features with a button on the bottom — in about three seconds. The thing they're not good at is the part underneath: which blue, how much spacing, which grey for borders, what radius pairs with what shadow. They pick from an infinite palette and they pick badly.
A constrained token set is the cheapest, most reliable guardrail you can put in fron