Hey Jan, good question. It really depends on how you're using Storybook and what your repo is or does.

It looks like you're a designer, so I'll assume you have a bit of coding experience while working with other software engineers, but probably not a ton. So hopefully I can explain this answer well enough, because you'll need to know a little bit about reusable components, npm packages, and versioning.

If you were creating a design system, then a common pattern would be to publish your component library as an npm package, and then that npm package would be consumed by other apps by installing the component library as a dependency.

So if you were to, for example, make changes to a button component in your design system, you would merge those changes, publish a new version of the package, and then apps using the component library could upgrade the package in their app to see the latest changes to the button components take effect.

All of that so far is a basic workflow when working with npm packages. We haven't introduced Storybook at all yet.

Now, when working with Storybook, yes, Storybook is separate from the actual app. But so is your design system repo. Storybook in this case would be used for local development by those working on the component library, and it'd be used as a showcase and documentation for those using the component library.

The thing to understand here though is that Storybook runs your actual code. So maybe to answer your question, you're not making changes to a component in one place in Storybook and then copying over those changes in another place to your app. The changes are all just in one place (the component), and then they're documented/showcased in Storybook and used in the actual app through the npm package.

Hope that helps!

I'd recommend reading their docs or going through one of their tutorials if you're interested in learning more about Storybook. https://storybook.js.org/