The Belief
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I've believed a real docsite was foundational to a design system since the beginning. For a long time, I wouldn't call what we had a "real" design system without one. The wires for a Living Style Guide were one of the first things I designed, back in the 2020–21 timeframe.
We never had one. Still don't. HDS grew out of 10% of my time, then 50%, then a rotating cast of engineers trying to operationalize a concept I'd sold before there was real infrastructure behind it. Engineers defaulted to tools they already knew for technical documentation, which is fine for that purpose — but designers were left working straight out of Figma UI kits, with guidance embedded directly in the files next to the components themselves. That held for a while. It doesn't scale, it bloats the system it's supposed to support, and it goes stale the moment anything changes. There was zero automation behind any of it.
I wanted something closer to what the real industry leaders had already built. It wasn't in the budget — the company was navigating investor pressure at the time, and design wasn't high on the priority list. So the workaround held longer than it should have.