AI means your design system can't suck anymore
Summary
You have a component library and some helpful colleagues. Not a design system. You've probably been there. You need a component, but the choices available don't quite fit. And the documentation doesn't answer your question about how to work with it. So you find someone to ask. A senior designer who's been around long enough to know. A Slack thread from 2024. An engineer who remembers why the pattern exists the way it does. It somehow works out. But that's not the design system functioning properly. That's you and your colleagues compensating for it. And AI doesn't compensate. It'll take what's visible, follow a likely pattern. It makes something plausible. But plausible isn't the same as correct. Every gap that you and your team papered over with a conversation is now a hole for AI to fall straight through. It means more than documenting what you already have more rigorously. The scope of what a design system needs to capture is expanding. It's always been more than components and patterns. It's the broader product context to give those artifacts meaning. You and your colleagues have carried that all informally. AI needs it to be explicit. This session is about what it means to build something AI can use without you and other helpful humans standing behind it.
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