Guide

Lock-in

What you own at each layer, what stays proprietary, and what leaving costs — measured, not promised.

Five layers, measured

Every component library locks you in somewhere. The honest question is where, and how much. Measured on the current registry of 132 items, from the bottom up:

Runtime: zero. Installed code makes no network call to any Control UI host — the single fetch in the codebase inlines already-rendered notification images from your own origin and falls back to nothing. MIT licensed. If this project disappears, your app keeps running unchanged.

npm: low. 55 items carry zero npm dependencies; 40 more need only Base UI or lucide. Heavy dependencies stay isolated in the item that uses them — Shiki in code, Streamdown (Vercel's streaming Markdown renderer) in markdown, six ProseMirror packages in chat-composer even when it renders as a plain textarea.

Conventions: medium. The anatomy attributes, 441 knob names, data-skin, and ControlUiSkin are proprietary vocabulary, like any library's. They live in files you own, so they cannot be revoked — but they are ours, not a standard.

Skins: high. 22 of the 46 required tokens carry shadcn's names and port directly to any shadcn theme tool. Everything past tokens — skin.css, knob re-values, adornments — is expressive precisely because it is not portable. A shadcn theme is strictly more portable; a skin is strictly more expressive. Pick per project.

Governance: high, today. The contract tests, generators, and validation tooling run in this repository, not in your install. A versioned contract artifact and a consumer-side doctor are planned, not shipped.

What leaving costs

Leaving is mechanical, not catastrophic. The component source, hooks, and utilities are plain React in your tree and need nothing to keep working. What you would rewrite is the paint: recipes and skins express the entire visual layer through the knob contract, so exiting the system means re-inlining that CSS into whatever you move to — utilities, CSS modules, another library's conventions. No tool exists for that migration today.

The half-exit is cheaper and often enough: stop updating. Owned source has no license server and no peer dependency on a runtime package, so a frozen install is a complete, working snapshot.

Continuity

Everything needed to rebuild the system is public: the full registry source, the generators that derive every payload, and the generated payloads themselves are committed to the GitHub repository under MIT. A fork can regenerate and serve the registry without any private piece.

What a fork does not get yet is governance — semver on the anatomy contract, a changelog, rename aliases, and a doctor that runs against your install rather than this repo. Until those ship, the honest summary is: the code survives anything; the system that maintains the code survives through this repository.