Features are cheap. Systems are expensive.

In the early days of a product, velocity is measured by visible surface area. How many buttons? How many screens? How many flows? We celebrate features because they are tangible evidence of work.

But every feature added without a unifying system creates an exponential tax on future development. I call this 'The Debt of Velocity'. It's not just code debt; it's decision debt. When three different engineers solve the same UI problem in three slightly different ways, you haven't built three features. You've built three conflicting truths about your product.

A system isn't a UI kit. It's a set of constraints that liberates decision making. When I architect a frontend, I spend the first week building nothing visible. I build the data layer, the type definitions, the state management patterns. Stakeholders get nervous. They want to see pixels.

Then, in week two, we ship the entire MVP. Because the system handles the reality, the features are just configuration.

If you are building for the demo, build features. If you are building for the decade, build systems.