The library always claims more coverage than it has. Inventory from what ships — the code and the screens — never from the library's own contents page.
When to use
- Track A of an evaluation — the design-system entry point
- Before a rebrand, a re-theme, or a platform expansion
- Joining a mature system and needing to know what is real
Procedure
- Inventory what ships. Walk the production screens and the front-end source. Record every component instance: name, where used, whether it comes from the library or is a detached or bespoke copy.
- Extract the tokens in real use. Every colour, type size, spacing value, radius and shadow that appears in shipped code. Not the declared set — the used set.
- Diff. Declared versus used, in both directions:
- Declared and unused → dead weight, or a documentation failure
- Used and undeclared → drift, and the reason re-theming is impossible
- Used under two names → a naming failure that will break Code Connect
- Build the coverage matrix. Screens down, components across. Mark library / detached / bespoke. The detached percentage is the single most predictive number in the report.
- Score each component on the five axes in
heuristic-audit/reference/rubric.md— states, accessibility, documentation, adoption, code parity. - Check parity properly. A component matches its code when the name, the structure and the behaviour match — not when it looks the same. Verify through Dev Mode and Code Connect with a front-end engineer, not by eye.
- Attach a cost to every finding and sequence the fixes. Report using
templates/drift-report.md.
Rules
- Count, don't estimate. If you cannot count it, say so and say why.
- Never report a component as adopted because it exists in the library.
- Drift is not a moral failing. Report the cost, not the sin — the team has to work with you afterward.
- A fix to a primitive that closes twelve findings is the headline. Lead with it.
Bundled files
reference/token-schema.md— the three-tier token architecture to diff againsttemplates/drift-report.md— the output format