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Designed vs. Declared: How to Document a Design System for AI

A tested take on why description fields and annotations beat designed doc frames when the consumer is an AI agent, not a human.

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TJ
May 22, 2026
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Designed documentation (left) versus declared documentation (right).

There’s a quiet assumption baked into a lot of the AI-and-design-systems excitement right now: that if we document our components well, an agent can pick that up and do something useful with it. Generate code, write some valuable markdown files, scaffold a couple of Storybook stories, e…

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