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interactions@Ibelick

Don't Mix Primitive Systems Within One Surface

NEVER

NEVER: Mix primitive systems (Radix + React Aria) within the same interaction surface. Focus management conflicts cause bugs. Pick one system per component.

Never mix primitive libraries within the same interaction surface — a dialog whose trigger, content, and focus trap come from different systems

Bad

Good

Why it matters

The scope qualifier is the whole rule. Two primitive systems inside one interaction surface fight over the same state: focus trapping, portalling, outside-click dismissal, and Escape handling get claimed twice, so focus lands in the wrong place and Escape closes the wrong layer. Across separate surfaces this is not an error — a codebase mid-migration may legitimately serve Radix in one surface and Base UI in another, and forcing a big-bang swap is worse than living with the split. Converge surface by surface.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.