Variable (the abstraction)
Francois Viete
Representing a known or unknown quantity with a letter so you can compute with it as if it were the value.
The same terms, in order
Forty terms with a placed date, read as a chronology instead of an index. From the variable in 1591 to the thesis itself.
1591
1984
Literate programming
Donald Knuth, Stanford
Writing a program as one document that interleaves the explanation, ordered for a human, with the code the compiler extracts.
1994
Separation of structure and style
Hakon Wium Lie (CSS), proven by Dave Shea (CSS Zen Garden)
Keeping content separate from how it looks, so one structure can wear many styles and a value can change in one place.
c. 2001
JSON
Douglas Crockford
A lightweight, language-neutral data format of key-value pairs and arrays.
Model-driven architecture (MDA)
Object Management Group
An older approach making formal models the primary artifact and generating code from them.
2004
Markdown
John Gruber, with Aaron Swartz
A plain-text formatting syntax meant to be readable as-is.
2009
EARS notation
Alistair Mavin and team, Rolls-Royce
The Easy Approach to Requirements Syntax: five sentence patterns that make requirements testable and unambiguous.
c. 2010
JSON Schema
Community, early drafts by Kris Zyp
A vocabulary for declaring the shape of JSON so it can be validated.
2013
Atomic design
Brad Frost
A mental model that builds interfaces from small composable parts, atoms to molecules to organisms, up to pages.
c. 2014
Design token
Jina Anne with Jon Levine, Salesforce
A design decision stored as data instead of a hardcoded value.
c. 2015
CSS custom properties
W3C
Native variables in the browser (--name: value) that made tokens practical on the web.
Theo
Salesforce
Salesforce's original open-source tool to transform tokens into platform code.
2016
Token tiers
Nathan Curtis, EightShapes
The layered naming model where raw values (primitives) are aliased to purpose (semantic) and then to component-level tokens.
2017
Style Dictionary
Danny Banks, Amazon
A build tool that turns one set of tokens into platform-specific code (CSS, Swift, XML).
Transformer architecture
Vaswani et al., Google
The neural network architecture, built on self-attention, under every large language model in the stack.
2019
Design Tokens Community Group (DTCG)
Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, W3C
The vendor-neutral W3C body that standardizes the token format.
2020
Prompt engineering
No clean single coiner, emerged with GPT-3
Crafting the input to steer a model's output.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Patrick Lewis et al., Meta (FAIR)
Grounding a model's output in documents retrieved at query time instead of relying only on what it memorized.
Tokens Studio
Jan Six
A plugin and platform for managing tokens in Figma and syncing JSON to code.
2023
Figma Variables
Figma
Token-like variables native to Figma, with aliasing and modes.
Function calling, tool use
OpenAI
Letting a model return a structured call to a defined function or tool.
2024
Tessl
Guy Podjarny
Spec-centric, AI-native development tooling oriented toward spec-as-source.
llms.txt
Jeremy Howard, Answer.AI
A Markdown file at a site root giving agents a curated map of what to read; llms-full.txt inlines the content.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
Anthropic
An open protocol that gives agents a common way to connect to tools, data, and context.
2025
CLAUDE.md
Anthropic
Claude Code's project memory file.
DESIGN.md
Emerging convention
A file pairing machine-readable tokens with the prose that explains the visual identity.
SKILL.md
Anthropic
A packaging convention for portable agent capabilities, instructions plus the resources an agent loads when relevant.
Spec Kit
GitHub
GitHub's toolkit for the Specify, Plan, Tasks, Implement loop.
Spec-driven development (SDD)
Modern framing via GitHub Spec Kit
Making a written, version-controlled spec the source of truth and treating generated code as a regenerable artifact.
Spec-first, spec-anchored, spec-as-source
Birgitta Böckeler, Thoughtworks
Three maturity levels: write-then-discard the spec, keep it governing, or only ever edit the spec.
The structure-not-size finding
Diana Wolosin and Tony Rucker, Indeed
Structured JSON beat prose-heavy docs for feeding components to an agent.
goose
Block
An open-source, local-first agent framework.
Vibe coding
Andrej Karpathy
Prompting an agent ad hoc and shipping what comes back without reading it.
Context engineering
Tobi Lutke, amplified by Karpathy
Deciding what goes into the model's working memory at each step and what stays out.
Kiro
Amazon
A spec-driven agentic IDE that turns prompts into requirements, design, and tasks.
AGENTS.md
OpenAI
A simple Markdown file giving coding agents consistent project-specific guidance.
DTCG format
DTCG, W3C
The open .tokens.json format with $value, $type, and $description.
Agentic AI Foundation (AAIF)
Linux Foundation, with Anthropic, Block, OpenAI
A neutral home for agentic standards.
2026
The four layers
Ryan Payne
The chain that hands context down: values (tokens), meaning (machine-readable logic), intent (spec-driven development), delivery (runtime context).
Tokens to agents
Ryan Payne
The argument that a design system is no longer documentation a human reads but infrastructure an agent executes against.
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