Gated propagation: design-system change → human review → standalone demo (epic)

[LinzLos]

Description

(Epic) Build a propagation pipeline so the standalone demo (Tiny Wire.html) consumes the design system from lib/ instead of duplicating it — but with a human review gate between a design-system change and its arrival in the demo. The flow should be: change lib/ → human reviews/approves the design decision → it propagates to the demo. Not an unattended auto-sync.

Why

Issues #2 (stale inline tokens) and #3 (a11y framing drift) are symptoms of one root cause: the demo hand-duplicates lib/ tokens + components, so the two silently diverge and every change must be mirrored by hand. We want the demo to track the system automatically — without removing the deliberate moment where a person signs off on a design change before it ships into the showcase. Removing the human entirely would let unreviewed token changes flow straight to the public demo.

Recommended prerequisite

None — this is the enabler/parent. Implementing it subsumes the recurrence of #2 (the manual reconcile becomes unnecessary once the demo derives from lib/).

Scope

Architecture + build. Likely components: (a) make the demo source tokens/components from lib/ (e.g. @import, or a small build step that injects the current lib/ token block into the demo), (b) a diff/approval gate — show the human the design delta and require explicit approval before propagation, (c) optionally wire this into the FLOWIE/SYNTHIE operator-agent pattern so the gate is an agent step with a human checkpoint. Explicitly NOT in scope: changing the v1.5 token contract; touching downstream prototypes. Decide build-step vs. live-@import as part of this issue.

Touches

• Tiny Wire.html (shared)
• lib/globals.css (shared)
• lib/components.css (shared)
• build/ or scripts/ — new propagation + gate script (shared)

Source

Ad hoc — requested during the v1.5 green→cobalt migration (2026-06-14 session): "figure out an automated way to update the standalone demo with a gate in it… a human reviews the design decisions before it gets flowed to the demo."

Owner

Lindsay (design-system owner / sole coder).

Acceptance criteria

• Demo derives tokens (and ideally components) from lib/ — no hand-duplicated :root
• A documented human-approval gate sits between a lib/ change and demo propagation
• A lib/ token change does NOT reach the demo until explicitly approved
• Decision recorded: live @import vs. build-step injection, and why
• Once shipped, Reconcile standalone demo (Tiny Wire.html) inline tokens with lib/globals.css #2's manual reconcile is closed as obsolete