Sauce Labs Agentic Design System
Overview
AI agents were speeding up how we designed and built, but their output was visually inconsistent, even with our design system. Alongside a full company rebrand, I led a rebuild of the Sauce Labs design system from scratch so AI agents could use it accurately and every team could prototype on brand.
The Challenge
There was no playbook. Agents used some parts of the system and ignored others, and no one knew why. This was a new problem created by frontier technology, and it landed in the middle of a rebrand, so we had to modernize the brand and the system at the same time.
The Plan
Ship an MVP rebrand fast while running experiments to learn why agents could not fully use the system. We compared the same screens before and after each change to make the impact visible, then rebuilt foundations and token names to be agent readable and wrote skills explaining how designers choose components.
The Results
Agents now produce far more accurate one-shot results with the system. Designers, product managers, and engineers prototype together in one consistent, on-brand language, and the design system works as shared infrastructure for people and AI agents alike.