The design system drifting one app at a time
A four-app design system drifted: a banned icon library still imported, a hardcoded hex instead of the accent token, and components built but never mounted.
Two copies drifted
One idea kept by hand in two places — schema and migration, dev and prod, app and app.
Auditing all four apps for the design sweep, I found the system had fractured. Super-admin still imports the icon library I banned from every other app months ago. Its logo is hardcoded to #970C10 instead of the accent token — a wrong red, in shipped code. Mobile's celebration burst was built, polished, and never mounted anywhere. The mobile landing page ships a marquee of fake organisation names.
The cause is structural rather than careless: the redesign went app by app and the last one never got its turn, and nothing fails a build for an unmounted component, a bypassed token or placeholder content. The system had documentation with a banned-patterns list, and nothing that ever swept the apps against it. A design system without an enforcement pass is a wish — docs tell you the rules, only a sweep tells you whether the product follows them.