Design System Tools Every Developer Should Use

This talk is confirmed. The time of the talk will be announced soon.

The recording will be published after editing. Multipass and Full ticket holders have early access.

You don't need a design system to think like a design system team. This talk is a tactical tour of the tooling habits that design system teams rely on daily, and that any product developer can steal, even working in an app with zero shared components.

I'll cover writing a Storybook story for every state as you build, not after, so loading, error, empty, and edge cases exist by default instead of by accident. I'll show why visual regression testing isn't a design system nice-to-have, but the fastest way to catch UI bugs that code review structurally cannot see. I'll make the case for building on accessible-by-default primitives (Radix, React Aria, Base UI, shadcn/ui) instead of hand-rolling focus management from scratch.

And I'll connect this directly to 2026: a growing share of UI code is AI-generated, and these are exactly the habits and tools, including the new Storybook MCP server, that keep AI-assisted UI from turning into slop. You'll leave with a toolkit you can adopt this week, no design system required.

This talk has been presented at React Day Berlin 2026, check out the latest edition of this React Conference.

tooling

Will Klein

Video transcription, chapters and summary will be available later.

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