"At first, I was excited because the developer's experience felt amazing. There was solid documentation, clean APIs, components that just worked, and shipping new features felt faster and smoother. But after a few months, the excitement began to fade. We weren't struggling with the library itself so much as with everything around it: keeping designs consistent, trying to manage overrides, and making sure that everyone was aligned."
"That's when it hit me: a great DX alone doesn't always guarantee great product delivery. Scrolling through r/reactjs recently, I noticed the same story playing out everywhere around Shadcn vs Mantine, or some other UI kit swap. Developers rave about how smooth Mantine or Shadcn feels, then a few months later, they're switching kits again. I could relate; I was in that cycle myself."
Good developer experience speeds day-to-day building through painless installation, solid documentation, intuitive APIs, theming, and interactive playgrounds. Those benefits improve initial productivity and feature delivery. Long-term challenges include scaling a design system, maintaining visual and behavioral consistency, managing overrides, and keeping teams aligned. Failing to address governance, component ownership, conventions, and contribution workflows leads teams to repeatedly swap libraries and lose time. Sustainable delivery requires explicit design-system strategy: shared tokens, consistent primitives, clear override rules, documented patterns, ownership and maintenance responsibilities, automated audits, and processes for onboarding and design‑developer collaboration.
Read at LogRocket Blog
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