Everyone agrees tokens are good. Nobody agrees on what they are.
Ask five teams what a design token is and you’ll get five answers: a CSS variable, a JSON key, a Figma variable, a named color, a semantic alias for a named color. All of them right in some context. None of them interoperable.
The real problem isn’t tooling. It’s that “token” is load-bearing jargon with no shared definition. Every platform adapted the concept differently and now the ecosystem is a translation layer.
Design Foundry tries to sidestep this by treating tokens as typed, versioned contracts between design and engineering - not as a file format. The format is an implementation detail. The contract is the thing.