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extract skill

/ai/skills/extract

This skill identifies reusable patterns, components, and tokens and consolidates them into a design system for systematic reuse.

This is most likely a fork of the extract skill from pbakaus
npx playbooks add skill steveclarke/dotfiles --skill extract

Review the files below or copy the command above to add this skill to your agents.

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SKILL.md
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---
name: extract
description: Extract and consolidate reusable components, design tokens, and patterns into your design system. Identifies opportunities for systematic reuse and enriches your component library.
user-invokable: true
args:
  - name: target
    description: The feature, component, or area to extract from (optional)
    required: false
---

Identify reusable patterns, components, and design tokens, then extract and consolidate them into the design system for systematic reuse.

## Discover

Analyze the target area to identify extraction opportunities:

1. **Find the design system**: Locate your design system, component library, or shared UI directory (grep for "design system", "ui", "components", etc.). Understand its structure:
   - Component organization and naming conventions
   - Design token structure (if any)
   - Documentation patterns
   - Import/export conventions
   
   **CRITICAL**: If no design system exists, ask before creating one. Understand the preferred location and structure first.

2. **Identify patterns**: Look for:
   - **Repeated components**: Similar UI patterns used multiple times (buttons, cards, inputs, etc.)
   - **Hard-coded values**: Colors, spacing, typography, shadows that should be tokens
   - **Inconsistent variations**: Multiple implementations of the same concept (3 different button styles)
   - **Reusable patterns**: Layout patterns, composition patterns, interaction patterns worth systematizing

3. **Assess value**: Not everything should be extracted. Consider:
   - Is this used 3+ times, or likely to be reused?
   - Would systematizing this improve consistency?
   - Is this a general pattern or context-specific?
   - What's the maintenance cost vs benefit?

## Plan Extraction

Create a systematic extraction plan:

- **Components to extract**: Which UI elements become reusable components?
- **Tokens to create**: Which hard-coded values become design tokens?
- **Variants to support**: What variations does each component need?
- **Naming conventions**: Component names, token names, prop names that match existing patterns
- **Migration path**: How to refactor existing uses to consume the new shared versions

**IMPORTANT**: Design systems grow incrementally. Extract what's clearly reusable now, not everything that might someday be reusable.

## Extract & Enrich

Build improved, reusable versions:

- **Components**: Create well-designed components with:
  - Clear props API with sensible defaults
  - Proper variants for different use cases
  - Accessibility built in (ARIA, keyboard navigation, focus management)
  - Documentation and usage examples
  
- **Design tokens**: Create tokens with:
  - Clear naming (primitive vs semantic)
  - Proper hierarchy and organization
  - Documentation of when to use each token
  
- **Patterns**: Document patterns with:
  - When to use this pattern
  - Code examples
  - Variations and combinations

**NEVER**:
- Extract one-off, context-specific implementations without generalization
- Create components so generic they're useless
- Extract without considering existing design system conventions
- Skip proper TypeScript types or prop documentation
- Create tokens for every single value (tokens should have semantic meaning)

## Migrate

Replace existing uses with the new shared versions:

- **Find all instances**: Search for the patterns you've extracted
- **Replace systematically**: Update each use to consume the shared version
- **Test thoroughly**: Ensure visual and functional parity
- **Delete dead code**: Remove the old implementations

## Document

Update design system documentation:

- Add new components to the component library
- Document token usage and values
- Add examples and guidelines
- Update any Storybook or component catalog

Remember: A good design system is a living system. Extract patterns as they emerge, enrich them thoughtfully, and maintain them consistently.

Overview

This skill extracts and consolidates reusable UI components, design tokens, and layout patterns into a maintainable design system. It identifies systematic reuse opportunities, produces well-documented components and tokens, and provides a safe migration path to replace duplicated implementation. The goal is improved consistency, accessibility, and developer productivity.

How this skill works

It scans code and UI directories to locate an existing design system or shared components and maps naming, token structure, and import conventions. It detects repeated components, hard-coded values, inconsistent variations, and candidate patterns, then prioritizes what to extract based on reuse and maintenance cost. The skill produces component implementations, semantic tokens, usage docs, and a planned migration of existing instances to the shared system.

When to use it

  • Onboarding a fragmented codebase with duplicated UI implementations
  • Before centralizing styling and component usage across multiple projects
  • When you spot repeated hard-coded values that should be tokens
  • To formalize accessibility and prop APIs for common UI elements
  • When updating a product to improve visual consistency

Best practices

  • Verify an existing design system first; ask before creating a new one
  • Extract only items with clear reuse value; avoid one-off extractions
  • Prefer semantic tokens and a small set of primitives with clear names
  • Design components with sensible defaults, accessible behavior, and documented variants
  • Plan a stepwise migration: find instances, replace, test, then delete old code

Example use cases

  • Consolidate three different button implementations into a single accessible Button component with variants
  • Extract color, spacing, and typography values into a token set and map semantic tokens to primitives
  • Standardize card and list patterns used across multiple apps and add examples to the component catalog
  • Refactor repeated layout patterns (grid, form, modal) into documented patterns with code samples
  • Migrate legacy components to typed APIs and add Storybook entries for discoverability

FAQ

What if no design system exists?

Ask stakeholders where a shared system should live and how it should be structured before creating one. Start small and iterate.

How do I decide what to extract?

Prioritize items used 3+ times or likely to be reused, that improve consistency, and have acceptable maintenance cost.