{"type":"rich","version":"1.0","provider_name":"Transistor","provider_url":"https://transistor.fm","author_name":"The Question: Design System Collaborative Learning","title":"Episode 079 Deep Dive: The Evolution of Design System Documentation with Ben Callahan and Afyia Smith","html":"","width":"100%","height":180,"duration":3263,"description":"Episode 079 Deep Dive: The Evolution of Design System Documentation with Ben Callahan and Afyia Smith\nBen Callahan is joined by Afyia Smith, a content designer and technical writer who spent five years as a documentation specialist on the design system team at Epic Games, built AI readiness frameworks and governance models there, and now collaborates with PJ Onori on the DSDS documentation spec. Together with the community, they dig into who owns design system documentation and what changes when agents start reading it.\nThe survey went to more than 1,100 design system practitioners and drew 61 responses across five questions. The conversation covers machine readable versus machine parsable formats, recipes and gotchas files, decision trees for agents, the split between reference and guidance documentation, just-in-time docs, and whether AI should be writing documentation at all.\nShow Notes\n00:07 — Welcome to the Episode 079 deep dive\n00:40 — Afyia's path into design system documentation\n02:25 — Five years as a documentation specialist at Epic Games\n03:50 — Emailing PJ Onori to contribute to DSDS\n06:21 — This week's five questions, 1,100 sent, 61 responses\n09:18 — Breaking down the responses that chose \"other\"\n10:15 — Everyone figuring agentic workflows out on their own\n11:04 — Looking for a correlation that isn't there\n12:56 — Robin Di Capua on encoding compositional do's and don'ts\n14:24 — Patterns, templates, and recipes in the DSDS spec\n18:08 — Doug Neiner on recipes and gotchas files\n19:16 — Kelby Gassman on docs turning into decision trees\n23:52 — Kevin Coyle on machine readable versus machine parsable\n26:09 — Surface-level delivery versus foundational content\n27:04 — Stephen Greco on moving from Markdown to JSON and YAML\n29:27 — Robin Di Capua on keeping prose alongside structured data\n30:56 — Stephen Greco on reference documentation versus guidance\n34:05 — Question five: humans, machines, or somewhere between\n35:54 — Doug Neiner's Kindle and recipe book...","thumbnail_url":"https://img.transistorcdn.com/8ZoZhDyVederAFF-YGuNFdyaUvqzao3a6rYS6VFp3F4/rs:fill:0:0:1/w:400/h:400/q:60/mb:500000/aHR0cHM6Ly9pbWct/dXBsb2FkLXByb2R1/Y3Rpb24udHJhbnNp/c3Rvci5mbS9kMjQ2/MjJjYzdiYmY4MWU0/NGQzMjJmOGUyNzlj/YmMwZS5wbmc.webp","thumbnail_width":300,"thumbnail_height":300}