Tokens Are Not a Theme
On the difference between naming a color and meaning it.
Excepteur sint occaecat cupidatat non proident. I keep seeing design systems where the token layer is a CSV of hex values with kebab-case names, and the team claims the site supports themes.
What a token actually is
A token is a promise about a role — “this surface is a raised card, use the raised-surface color, whatever that happens to be today.” If the name encodes the value, it isn’t a token; it’s a renamed constant.
The test
If you can’t swap the value underneath without changing any component code, the system doesn’t have tokens. It has variables.