A design system is a set of decisions
Components are the easy part. Writing down why is what keeps a system alive.
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When we started the design system at Ledgerline, we spent two months building buttons, inputs and tables. They were good components. Six months later, half the team had forked them.
The components were never the problem. What was missing was the reasoning: why primary buttons sit on the right, why tables never truncate amounts, why errors appear under the field and not in a toast.
Decisions travel, components drift
We started writing one short page per decision. A rule, the reason for it, and one example of it being broken badly. Those pages outlived three rewrites of the components themselves.
If I started a system again tomorrow, I would write the decisions first and draw the buttons second.