shadcn/ui adoption — design systems shift
Copy-paste, not install. shadcn/ui changed how teams build UIs. Two years later — what stuck and what fell apart.
shadcn/ui ships components as source code you paste into your repo. No npm package, no version lock-in. Tailwind + Radix under the hood.
What worked: teams own their UI. Customisation is trivial because it's just your code. Documentation reads itself.
What broke: copy-paste means no automatic updates. Teams forget to sync improvements upstream. Drift accumulates.
For new projects: still the best starting point. For existing codebases with sass-heavy UI: not worth migrating.