I said yes

Signed. I am joining properly, to lead user experience and accessibility.

I told my manager last week that I feel empowered, capable and ready to help this company through a digital transformation it badly needs. I meant it, and I am writing it down because I would rather be held to my own words than remember them generously later.

Today, in a channel about AI, someone asked whether we could feed our design component library and our instructions into these tools in such a way that whatever they produce is on the design system from the start.

That is the right question, and almost nobody is asking it yet.

Everyone in the industry right now is asking how to get AI to write more code faster. That question assumes output is judged by whether it runs. This one assumes output is judged by whether it matches something — and if it has to match something, that something must exist somewhere the tool can actually reach.

Ours does not. Ours lives in Figma files, in a spreadsheet of approved wording, in documentation behind the VPN, and in the heads of about five people. That is a normal, well-run design system by 2024 standards, and it is about to be the wrong shape entirely.

I have spent a long time building design systems for human readers — teaching them, documenting them, mentoring designers into using them. I am confident about that part. What I am certain of, as of today, is that the audience is changing, and the teams that notice first will have an advantage that compounds.

So here is the bet I am joining on. Within two years, the design systems that matter will be the ones a machine can read at the moment code is written. The ones that stay in a drawing tool will be politely ignored by the thing actually writing the software. I would like us to be early to that, not late.

That is the job I just accepted.