I keep thinking about what happens to design systems when the user is not only a person clicking through an interface, but also an agent trying to understand what it is allowed to do.

Traditional design systems gave teams reusable visual and interaction pieces. Buttons, cards, spacing, typography, states, components. But agents need a different layer of consistency: commands, source boundaries, privacy rules, evidence requirements, tool permissions, output contracts, and stop conditions.

That feels like the next version of a design system to me. Not replacing the visual system, but sitting beside it. A product should be legible to people and operable by agents.

From Human Interfaces to Agent Interfaces: Rethinking Software Design in the Age of AI-Native Systems

Software systems have traditionally been designed for human interaction, emphasizing graphical user interfaces, usability, and cognitive alignment with end users. However, recent advances in large language model (LLM)-based agents are changing the primary consumers of software systems. Increasingly, software is no longer only used by humans, but also invoked autonomously by AI agents through structured…

arXiv.org