How to lighten design system upkeep with the canvas agent

A design system is a promise that keeps needing to be kept. Most of the keeping is small: renaming a variant, re-pointing a colour, checking that nobody has drifted.

The maintenance list

• Rename variants to the convention, across every file that uses them

• Find hard-coded colours and offer the nearest token

• Audit text contrast on every surface, light and dark

Upkeep is where systems die. Not in the big redesign — in the hundred small things nobody had time for.

What we still do by hand

Deciding what a component is stays human. The agent proposes; the system team disposes.