A design system is not a Figma library.

Every six months a new design team announces, with great fanfare, that they have built a design system. They share a screenshot of their Figma library. They write a Medium post about the colours they chose. They are very pleased with themselves. Six months later, half their product still looks like a different app made by a different company, and their engineers are still arguing in pull requests about whether the button border-radius should be 4 or 6 pixels.

A design system is not a Figma library. A design system is the agreement, written in code and enforced by tooling, that defines how a product behaves. The Figma library is the dressing room. The code components are the actual clothes. The lint rules and the CI checks are the people who notice when you leave the house wearing two different shoes. A team that has only the Figma library has built a beautiful museum of clothes that nobody is wearing.

The real work of design systems is the boring part. Writing components in code. Documenting their props and edge cases. Running migrations to replace old usage. Killing the design tokens that nobody is using. Getting engineering buy-in for the lint rules. Arguing with the CTO about whether design system maintenance is "design work" or "engineering work." Almost none of this looks good on social media, which is why almost nobody talks about it, which is why almost every design system that gets announced is actually just a Figma library.

If you are leading a design system project in 2026, the test is simple. Open your codebase. Search for the hex code of one of your brand colours. If it appears outside the design system, you do not have a design system yet. You have a Figma library and a hope.