designing-consistentlylisted

# Designing consistently UI drift has two sources: styles invented in-session instead of consumed from the system, and decisions that live only in conversation memory. The record of those decisions is a **living file** — honoring it is half the loop; writing back is the other half, and it is the half that gets skipped. Two things make that hard in a real app. The system often is not a file yet: it is tokens in a stylesheet, dated gotchas in the repo's own agent context file, owner decisions left as comments in source. And once the file exists, it outgrows a session — a hundred and fifty surfaces is a normal size, and reading it whole is neither possible nor a virtue. ## Workflow Copy this checklist and tick items off: ``` Consistency progress: - [ ] 1. Discover what governs - [ ] 2. Read the slice - [ ] 3. Build consuming the system - [ ] 4. Record + repair (gate) - [ ] 5. Verify ``` **1. Discover.** Produce a written inventory of what already governs the surfaces about to be touched, ranked by who backs each source — never by how official the file looks. A missing DESIGN.md ends nothing; the system is somewhere else. Where to look: token definitions in stylesheets (custom properties, theme config), the app's own DESIGN.md if it has one, the repo's agent context files (`AGENTS.md` gotchas), prose design docs, dated owner decisions left inline in source comments (an owner name, a date, a ticket id), and the shared components the surfaces already use. | Rank | Source |