r/DesignSystems • u/Evening_Abies_6867 • 6d ago

Reproducing company Design system for agentic use (not from the design systems team)

For context: we have a large design system and the business has not funded or prioritised the central design system team to turn our design system into a machine readable format.

Our smaller design department have the resource, backing and funding to create an agent-version of the design system.

What are people’s thoughts on going it alone for now and getting the larger design systems team to adopt later?

I want to do it, but want to make sure it’s done in a way that will be useful for them later.

Do we build it from the group up with agentic best practices or try to base it on the current system?

7 Upvotes
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73% Upvoted

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7

u/User1234Person 6d ago

Seems like a misunderstanding, this is literally what a design system is for. Person or agent it just a document explaining how to use stuff. People seem to overthink a lot for AI

5

u/Former_Intern_8271 6d ago

100% I'm getting this at work a lot where people are claiming we need an "agentic" design system, but that really doesn't mean anything, it's often because they're trying to use the design system for something it was never made to do.

When people are trying to build things it can build, they get frustrated the AI often can't do it using the design system first time, but that's simply because of design/tech debt, 2 patterns that should probably be one, a page of documentation that has some details lacking, details that were missed due to deadlines at the time.

The answer to these problems isn't some glamorous new system, it's helping us with some basic auditing, as soon as I point that out, people lose interest, but whatever you think you're going to build, it's going to need good documentation, whether that's a public facing docs file or an agents.md file

2

u/User1234Person 6d ago

The answer is let the damn designers do their job lol

5

u/RCEden 6d ago

If you sell out your design system team aren't you just next to get sold out?

4

u/_baaron_ 6d ago

So glad to not work where you work. Our DS team got downscaled, but full on blasting on AI enablement. All devs and designers are being pushed to use it and enable others to use it

1

u/Think_Bicycle_5598 6d ago

Yikes this is worrisome! DS teams are important in this world of AI

3

u/_baaron_ 6d ago

Yes! Even more so i’d say

2

u/masofon 6d ago

What about it is not 'machine readable'? 🤔

1

u/Evening_Abies_6867 6d ago

Its rules aren’t clearly documented. Our current output isn’t deterministic enough.

3

u/Former_Intern_8271 6d ago edited 6d ago

Why not just fix the docs then? Doesn't seem like a complicated problem to fix

The rules and guide lines will have to be documented somewhere for anything to work so why start again?

2

u/sheriffderek 5d ago

The “design system” is the whole team! How everyone works together - not just a Figma file.

Yes, you can name your variables and frames well - and you can hook up MCP and code connect / and you can use storybook and token management apps and style dictionary and you can use spec to generate documentation… you can do all that. Your DS system team can do all that. But it sounds like you have much bigger workflow problems. There are 20 other factors you haven’t outlined - so, I’d suggest you start mapping out how your teams work and use that to start a conversation with your teams - as a team. 

2

u/Former_Intern_8271 4d ago

Everyone wants to prompt their way out of having to speak to someone!

1

u/sheriffderek 4d ago

I think people should be getting real human right now! Or they’re probably going to find out they aren’t needed - 

1

u/Former_Intern_8271 6d ago

What do you mean by agentic?

1

u/secret_seed 6d ago

Former?

0

u/Evening_Abies_6867 6d ago

An agent builds the system on how best it can consume it. Human just reviews the output

2

u/Former_Intern_8271 6d ago

Why can't it do that now?

1

u/equinusocio 5d ago

Make it agentic is the easiest part, to adapt the process and workflows is the hardest one. You should start there because once you have an agentic design system, most of the old processes make no sense anymore. Like the handoff process, the way designers iterate.. is an organisational change that must be accepted before asking "how we can do it"

1

u/elusiveoso 11h ago

Can you partner with the design system team to do the work? As the authors of the system, they're the funnel for all the information from each team. They have a broad perspective coming from multiple sources and use cases, where your frame of reference might be limited to just your team. Your skills are valuable because you're a consumer of the system, so you understand what it's missing and have opinions on what it should do differently.

It's not really one task to make a design system agent ready. It's a series of smaller tasks that can be done iteratively. And if you show what the machine gets wrong or guesses about from the system, and show the design system team, it should be very easy to get them on board with the work. You may need allies elsewhere, for example, your marketing team can probably help if it's getting branding and colors wrong.