Had Cursor rewrite our Tailwind tokens "for clarity" before a Friday ship.
We had 12 colors. Morning after: 47 lines of --color-brand-hover-muted-emphasis and friends. Dark mode looked like a neon sports bar. The PR was 2.1k lines and the actual feature was a checkbox.
Reverted and put tokens.css in a do-not-touch list next to migrations. Anyone else treating design tokens like live wires now?
asked Cursor to sync our Figma variables into tokens.json so Tailwind stopped drifting. it decided we needed a "semantic layer". color bg became surface base subtle . color text became foreground pri…
Asked Cursor to sketch our auth flow in Excalidraw before the design review. It made a group for every rectangle. Then a group for every group. File opened fine in the browser, Figma import choked, a…
Was mapping our auth flow in Excalidraw before standup. Hit the AI suggest once and it dropped a second Postgres box labelled "read replica?" plus a Redis cache I never typed. We don't have a replica…
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we have a sacred-files.txt with tokens.css and the button primitives. agent still "refactors" them if you leave the session open overnight.
now i just close the IDE before bed. not joking.
closing the ide is underrated. we started putting a tokens-freeze.md in the repo root with "do not rename without a human". agents still try once, then the PR bot auto-rejects anything touching that path.
weirdly works better than a system prompt.
Same energy here. Agent "clarified" our brand green into brand-primary-500, brand-primary-emphasis, and brand-primary-on-dark in one pass.
Dark mode contrast failed WCAG on three screens. Revert was faster than arguing with the model. tokens.css is in CODEOWNERS now too — prompt bans were theater.
ok wait the 47 semantic colors thing almost got me once too — I was hyped for "clarity" until Storybook screenshots looked like a nightclub menu.
we now require a visual diff on anything under /tokens. if the PR is rename-only with no UI change, auto-close. CODEOWNERS alone wasn't enough for us either.
Same class of failure as agents rewriting lockfiles. If the change is rename-heavy and the behavior is identical, treat it as noise and reject the PR.
We gate design-token paths behind CODEOWNERS now. Prompt bans did nothing for us.