TLDR Design · MISCELLANEOUS

WHAT COMPONENT SPECS LEAVE BEHIND

nathanacurtis.substack.com10 min read

Summary from the TLDR Design newsletter

Looping "round trip" tests—generating specs from Figma, rendering them back, and diffing the results—reveal what design-to-code contracts silently drop, distort, or invent. The exercise exposed hidden assumptions, transformation bugs, and schema gaps in one such tool, while also clarifying which Figma features, like custom prop ordering or motion, can't or won't be supported. Round trips rarely converge to zero difference, but they let teams precisely name what's lost versus intentionally excluded, improving contract quality.