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Comment by Spivak | Hacker News Reader

The things you list as criticism are exactly the reason places implement design systems. You're clearly an east coast school of thought person who takes pride in building the "right thing." But people who implement design systems are taking the worse is better approach on purpose. They see it as better to be clunky and contort functionality into the existing components and ship than spend time doing something custom.

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And unless the design system is really bad it shouldn’t be that clunky. Design is design, not art, each new app in a product suite should not be a unique snowflake, but a piece of the puzzle.

People are acting like there are actually new never-before-seen scenarios in CRUD web apps. I’ve only ever seen situations where the designer thought they needed to break the mold, never where it was actually necessary.

Feel like this especially true in design systems where they went as far as a few dozen atoms but did not progress to molecules or components (insert corollary term here). This exposes a lack of understanding the business and user needs.

genuine question because I've never heard this phrase, and search engines did not yield useful results: what do you mean by "east coast school of thought"? and then is there a corresponding "west coast school of thought"?

The two schools of thought here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Worse_is_better

Thank you, TIL!

I will admit I was briefly even more confused reading that the "west coast" model includes New Jersey (an east coast state) and the "east coast" model includes Stanford (a west coast university)... but whatever lol.

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