u/New_Mouse_2773

I’m on GPT Plus, and even for simple tasks, chatgpt GPT-5.5 thinking sometimes generates a super detailed plan with tests, edge cases, and tons of conditions. By the time I pass it to Codex 5.3 high, it feels like I’ve already burned through around 20% of my token budget.

I usually end up manually trimming the prompt, which kind of defeats the purpose.

How are you guys handling this?

I have a very practical question to ask: when designing UI (especially components), what do you usually use as your reference source?

Do you directly reference official iOS Kit or Material Design in Figma (as “a mature foundation/style guide”) when designing?
Or is a more common approach to reference some public UI libraries developed by third-party authors (for example, community/open-source components or design systems), and then create your own components based on them?

In my case, I initially referenced third-party public libraries to build my own components faster. But later I realized that iOS Kit and Material Design are already very mature and have a rich set of components—so now I’m torn about this:

Which approach is more “sustainable”? Which is less likely to cause problems when maintaining or migrating later on?

I’d really love to hear your experiences, especially:

• Why do you choose iOS Kit / Material Design, or why choose third-party public libraries instead? (e.g., consistency, efficiency, control, etc.)
• If a team also needs to build cross-platform products (iOS/Android or different platforms), how do you usually handle “platform differences”?
• For someone like me who’s new, which route would you recommend I focus on first?
  • Should I start by replicating/alignment with mature standards, or
  • should I first use public libraries to ship faster results, then iterate?
• If you’re comfortable sharing, what’s your background?

Thanks in advance—I’m looking forward to your advice and lessons learned from real projects.

Hi everyone, I’m building an indie app. I already designed the UI in Figma, but I noticed my components/styles aren’t consistent enough yet.

One extra complication: many of my components were copied from other UI libraries and then modified. As a result, I still see inconsistencies like:

button/input styles aren’t fully standardized
spacing and typography rules aren’t unified
component reuse and naming aren’t very disciplined
hover/disabled/loading states may behave differently across components
I’m worried this will slow down development and create extra maintenance/redo work later, especially after launch.

Questions:

In your experience, when do inconsistent Figma components/styles start to noticeably impact development speed?
If your time is limited, how far would you refactor before launch, specifically for “copied-and-modified” component sets?
Do you have a “minimum design system checklist” that’s enough to ship without getting stuck in polishing?
Thanks!