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Agent Standards Best Viewed in Every Assistant

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Agent Standards Best Viewed in Every Assistant

Friday, September 4, 2026 • Rosenfeld Community
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Agent Standards Best Viewed in Every Assistant
Speakers: Patrick Neeman and Jeffrey Zeldman
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Summary

A generation ago, Jeffrey Zeldman helped end the browser wars by making one case relentlessly: build to standards, not to vendors. That fight is back—now over how AI agents render interfaces across Claude, ChatGPT, Copilot, Teams, and Slack. In this session, Zeldman joins Patrick Neeman to trace the line from "best viewed in Netscape" to "best experienced in one assistant," and to have a call to arms for agentic UI actually needs. Expect hard-won lessons from the first standards war, and a clear-eyed look at MCP and A2UI.

Key Insights

  • •

    Generative AI platforms lack unified standards, causing costly, fragmented UX development.

  • •

    The web standards movement succeeded through community collaboration and public pressure.

  • •

    Separation of content and design enabled accessibility and future-proofing on the web.

  • •

    Current AI interfaces offer little control over the design details compared to traditional web design.

  • •

    Proprietary AI companies may resist compatibility to preserve exclusive user bases.

  • •

    AI tools risk devaluing human creativity and make credit and provenance recognition difficult.

  • •

    Young designers and engineers face uncertainty in career paths due to AI’s disruptive impact.

  • •

    Open source and community-driven efforts are critical in establishing AI interface standards.

  • •

    Historical patterns in tech show crises and revolutions tend to ‘rhyme’ over decades.

  • •

    Activism in tech today requires new models due to the vastly different power dynamics.

Notable Quotes

"We don’t have to deal with spacer.gif anymore."

"The separation of content from design led to accessibility and interoperability."

"Right now, designers have to think about how this appears on Slack versus Teams versus other platforms."

"It feels like there’s a real brain interacting with you, which is scary."

"We’re building our house in somebody else’s sandbox."

"If you execute perfectly on a leader’s bad strategy, and then the company goes out of business, you get punished for executing."

"History doesn’t repeat, but it sure does rhyme."

"There’s going to be fewer players in AI, and that power differential is huge."

"We need to control how the assistant evaluates design and accessibility."

"Individually, we have very little power, but together we have a great deal of power."

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