Somewhere along the way the lab had accumulated three overlapping stylesheets — one per project, each re-solving buttons, cards, chips, and shadows from scratch. Two of those projects are no longer running. The CSS outlived them.
Every decision here gets one test: does this make product #2 cheaper to launch than #1? Three design systems fails that test three times over. So we’re consolidating into a single workbench: one token file, one set of primitives, one reusable cartridge component that any future product drops its own identity into.
That product shelf on the home page isn’t just a list of tiles — it’s the dowry. When the next literacy is ready, it becomes a new cartridge on the shelf with a day of work, not a month, because the shelf, the split gesture, the account, and the email list are already built to hold more than one thing.
Small on purpose isn’t the same as slow on purpose. The point of staying small is that the second thing is easy — and you only get that by building the first one so it was always meant to have siblings.