Component-Driven Development with Storybook

The core idea behind component-driven development is simple: build the smallest meaningful UI unit first, verify it in isolation, then compose. Storybook makes that concrete by providing a sandbox where components render independently of any application state or routing context.

The workflow I've settled on is to write the story before or alongside the component. Thinking about the story args forces you to define the component's public API before writing its internals — which often leads to cleaner prop interfaces than you'd get by building the component first and documenting it later.

Stories double as a lightweight test harness. If you have a story for the edge case where a prop contains a very long string, or where an optional prop is absent, you've already written the test scenario. Visual regression tools can watch those stories and flag changes automatically.

The `autodocs` tag generates a documentation page from your story args and comments, which means component documentation is always in sync with the actual implementation. No stale READMEs, no outdated prop tables.

For this site every UI component, card, and section has a corresponding story file. The convention I've been following is to co-locate stories with components rather than putting them in a separate directory — it makes the relationship obvious and keeps the files together when you rename or move things.

Storybook 10 integrates cleanly with Vite and Tailwind v4 via the `@storybook/react-vite` framework, which means the same CSS pipeline that runs in the app also runs in Storybook. No separate configuration for custom properties or utility classes.