About
I'm Luis. I write code that pretends not to be there.
At LinkedIn in 2018, I helped found the Infrastructure UX team. We had a problem most product teams have but few teams own: every product was reinventing the same five buttons in slightly incompatible ways, and a brand refresh meant a six-month parade of pull requests across every consumer surface. The fix wasn't more components. The fix was changing how we thought about color.
I championed a mindset shift across the org — from thinking in colors
("this button is blue") to thinking in semantics ("this button uses
--color-action-primary"). It sounds small. It's the difference between a brand
refresh that takes six months and one that takes an afternoon. It's the difference between a
dark mode that ships as an invert and one that re-derives every surface from
semantic tokens. It's the difference between a design system you maintain and one that
maintains itself.
That thesis has shaped every design system I've touched since — LinkedIn's component library, the Figma tooling I built around it, Superhuman.com from scratch, the design-system tooling for designers I'm building now, the Grammarly experiments.
Beliefs, opinion-strong
- A design system is a *negotiation*, not a deliverable.
- The CSS cascade is a feature. Lean into it.
- Dark mode isn't a color flip — it's a re-derivation.
- "It's just CSS" usually means "I haven't read the spec recently."
- Prefer one strong signal color over five medium ones.
- I learn every day.
Timeline
- 2025 — present
- Frontend Engineer · Superhuman
- 2025 — present
- AI experiments · Grammarly
- 2017 — 2025
- Design Systems / Infrastructure UX · LinkedIn
- 2014 — 2017
- Conversational UI · Amazon (Alexa)
Mentorship
Some of the most rewarding work I do is the work that compounds through other people. I've mentored interns at LinkedIn who became full-time hires, and I'm currently working with two apprentices on the path from junior to mid. Player-coach is the role I'm always growing into.
AI tooling I ship
I also build small open-source tools that make designers and engineers faster — mostly MCP servers, Claude skills, and Claude Code plugins. A Figma MCP that lets Claude edit the canvas, a CSS-inspired cascade for AI context, a notes-on-a-branch system for sharing WIP between agents. See /colophon → AI-powered tooling for the index. The pattern: a problem I hit twice on a Tuesday becomes an open-source package by Friday.