Design Systems Are Maturing
Dark patterns gallery. Conversation as AI's metaphor. How to successfully design agentic AI systems.
It’s interesting to me that Figma had to have a separate conference and set of announcements focused on design systems. In some sense it’s an indicator of how big and mature this part of design has become.
A few highlights from my point-of-view…
Slots seem like one of those small paper cuts—those niggly inconveniences that we just lived with. But this is a big deal. You’ll be able to add layers within component instances without breaking the connection to your design system. No more pre-building hidden list items or forcing designers to detach components. Pretty advanced stuff.
On the code front, they’re making Code Connect actually approachable with a new UI that connects directly to GitHub and uses AI to map components. The Figma MCP server is out of beta and now supports design system guidelines—meaning your agentic coding tools can actually respect your design standards.
For teams like mine that are using Make, you’ll be able to pull in design systems through two routes: Make kits (generate React and CSS from Figma libraries) or npm package imports (bring in your existing code components). This is the part where AI-assisted design doesn’t have to mean throwing pixelcraft out the window.
Design systems have always been about maintaining quality at scale. These updates are very welcomed.
Highlighted Links
Collection of Dark Patterns and Unethical Design
Dark Patterns Hall of Shame is managed by a team of designers and researchers who have dedicated themselves to identifying and exposing dark patterns and unethical design examples on the internet. More than anything, I just love the names some of these dark patterns have, like Confirmshaming, Privacy Zuckering, and Roach Motel.
how to speak to a computer
Celine Nguyen wrote a piece that connects directly to what Ethan Mollick calls “working with wizards” and what SAP’s Ellie Kemery describes as the “calibration of trust” problem. It’s about how the interfaces we design shape the relationships we have with technology.
The through-line is metaphor. For LLMs, that metaphor is conversation. And it’s working—maybe too well:
Our intense longing to be understood can make even a rudimentary program seem human. This desire predates today’s technologies—and it’s also what makes conversational AI so promising and problematic.
When the metaphor is this good, we forget it’s a metaphor at all:
When we interact with an LLM, we instinctively apply the same expectations that we have for humans: If an LLM offers us incorrect information, or makes something up because it the correct information is unavailable, it is lying to us. …The problem, of course, is that it’s a little incoherent to accuse an LLM of lying. It’s not a person.
Designing a Successful Agentic AI System
We’ve been hearing a lot about AI agents and now enough time has passed that we’re starting to see some learnings in industry. Writing in Harvard Business Review, Linda Mantia, Surojit Chatterjee and Vivian S. Lee showcase three case studies of enterprises that have deployed AI agents.
They write about Hitachi Digital and how they deployed an AI agent as the first responder to the 90,000 questions employees send to their HR team annually.
Every year, employees put over 90,000 questions about everything from travel policies and remote work to training and IT support to the company’s HR team of 120 human responders. Answering these queries can be difficult, in part because of Hitachi’s complex infrastructure of over 20 systems of record, including multiple disparate HR systems, various payroll providers, and different IT environments.
What I’m Consuming
Episode 302: Buckingham Nicks: “Frozen Love” The Buckingham Nicks album, first released in 1973, introduced Stevie Nicks and Lindsey Buckingham before their tenure in Fleetwood Mac. The album, which had been out of print for decades, was remastered and re-released in 2025. The episode explores the creation of the song “Frozen Love,” the collaborative process between Nicks and Buckingham, and how the track played a pivotal role in their transition to Fleetwood Mac and the end of the Buckingham Nicks band.
First Shape Found That Can’t Pass Through Itself. Mathematicians constructed a convex polyhedron called the Noperthedron (90 vertices, 152 faces) and proved that no straight tunnel through it allows a congruent copy to pass, producing the first known convex polyhedron without Rupert’s property and disproving the conjecture that all convex polyhedra are Rupert. The proof combined analytical global and local theorems about projection shadows with an exhaustive computer partition of the orientation parameter space (about 18 million blocks), showing each block cannot contain a valid passage.
Can Liberalism Be Saved? In a new book, On Liberalism, Cass Sunstein defends a capacious “big‑tent” liberalism grounded in freedom, pluralism, the rule of law, human rights, and democracy, arguing it can encompass New Deal, classical, and libertarian strains while resisting illiberal currents on both left and right. He largely avoids partisan attacks, acknowledges problematic views and actions among influential liberals and conservatives, expresses cautious confidence that the Supreme Court remains committed to liberal principles, and recognizes tensions between liberal ideals and historical compromises such as imperialism.