Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

A few years ago everyone started talking about how AI-powered interfaces are going to start generating UI on the fly. But how close is that from being a reality? Have there been any advances towards it being a mainstream thing? And what do we need to know from a design systems perspective to cater towards it?

Show notes

• Rachel-Lee Nabors — "Death of the Browser" — the talk that sparked the topic
• ChatGPT Apps SDK — the plugin-style generative UI route, with Booking.com among the launch partners
• Interactive apps in Claude (MCP Apps) — the Anthropic equivalent
• A2UI — Google's declarative spec letting agents send UI as component descriptions rather than executing code
• The Complete Guide to Generative UI Frameworks in 2026 — a rundown of the generative UI framework landscape, covering A2UI, CopilotKit/AG-UI, MCP Apps and more
• NN/g's 10 Usability Heuristics — the "codified best practice" comparison
• Geri Reid — the Converge US talk — Geri’s talk about flexibility and NewsKit

Get in touch

• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

We really screwed the pooch when it came to naming design systems. Why is the name so bad? And should we call it something else? Or should we bin the whole concept of design systems and start over in a completely decommodified way?

Show notes

• NASA Graphics Standards Manual — the classic design handbook Luke references
• A Pattern Language — Christopher Alexander's town planning/architecture book
• Apple Human Interface Guidelines
• Atomic Design — Brad Frost's original article, which credits the earlier pattern library work
• Anna Debenham and Laura Kalbag — referenced in that article as part of the origins
• Co-op Experience Library — Co-op's renamed design system; their follow-up post explains they changed the name because "design system" implies it's only for designers, which backs up the whole episode thesis Co-op Digital Blog
• Valve's Handbook for New Employees — the famously flat, no-job-titles structure Luke half-remembers (it was Valve, not Epic)
• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky

Live recording of the fortnightly podcast Design Systems WTF (back for season two!), where Luke Murphy and Michelle Chin attempt to combat all the amazing wtf in design systems. In each episode, they answer a single question around design system troubles with a Q&A from the live audience.

Agentic is the buzz word of the moment - but what does it actually mean for design systems? Luke and Michelle have a real conversation about what's hype, what's possible, and where they see it all going.

Show notes

• Luke's webinar on automating documentation — the session covering the facts / distilled / authored buckets
• TJ Pitre / Southleft — doing agentic design system work (also behind FigmaLint with Brad and Ian Frost)
• Sil Bormüller — founder of Into Design Systems
• Romina Kavčič — The Design System Guide — the knowledge-graph-to-pattern work Luke describes
• Design System Documentation Spec (DSDS) — what you're auditing zeroheight docs against
• Obsidian and Roam Research — knowledge-graph tools mentioned by Michelle
• The Information Architecture Conference — Michelle's conference, which usually runs a knowledge graphs workshop
• n8n — Luke's stacked-agents automation instance
• Claude Code — used in Luke's Figma-MCP-to-code component flow
• zeroheight MCP — for the docs-as-context part of that flow
• Paper — mentioned by Mark in chat for better HTML output
• Pencil — design-as-code tool with .pen files
• Penpot — the open-source, web-dev-structured design tool

Get in touch

• Luke on Bluesky
• Michelle on Bluesky