J. Alejandro Bauer

Product Designer. AI Enthusiast. On a mission to make design systems that machines actually understand.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Your design system is a suggestion to an AI agent.

It reads your tokens and picks whatever feels close enough. It generates 10 screens with 10 different spacing values. None of it is wrong enough to notice at a glance. All of it adds up.

The fix is not better prompts. It is a 6-layer constraint framework.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@stephenhaney Yes, but HTML is the language for visual communication between humans and agents, not necessarily the best source of truth for agents themselves.

The moment HTML becomes canonical, complexity, navigation, hidden dependencies, and ambiguity start creeping in very fast.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

I think HTML makes sense for humans, but for agents it opens a Pandora’s box of complexity.

Links, navigation, hidden dependencies, interaction logic… suddenly the agent is exploring instead of reasoning through a constrained system.

And the moment we add rules to make HTML reliable, we slowly rebuild a Markdown-like environment again.

The future probably isn’t Markdown vs HTML, but constrained semantic systems optimized for agent reasoning.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@MengTo @gregisenberg This is a stretch and you know it. A design system requiere constraints. Markdowns alone cannot achieve that.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@Ahmedcreatives Nop, and that's our responsibility as designers. Mark the guide in the beginning, optimize with AI.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@bengold Exactly. I just don't get the vibe when they have not even tested it.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@gdb Smooth as butter

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@bengold The lastest update on Figma Make was so... Really? Are you telling me the only way I can keep componenr consistency is inside Figma Make? 🙄

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@DannPetty Ok I need to test this

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Your design system is a suggestion to an AI agent.

It reads your tokens and picks whatever feels close enough. It generates 10 screens with 10 different spacing values. None of it is wrong enough to notice at a glance. All of it adds up.

The fix is not better prompts. It is a 6-layer constraint framework.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@hamen omg this is amazing, testing it asap

one thing I think is missing: `useWhen` annotations

it tells the agent what each component is, not when to pick it over an alternative

that's the gap between human-readable docs and agent-optimized ones

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

The moment Figma Console MCP (not the official one) gets more popular, y'all gonna switch again to Figma.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@omartosca Preach!!!!

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Agents don't fail because they're not smart enough. They fail because you gave them the wrong shape of information. Constraint over instruction. That's the whole thesis.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@tirumalab_ch @sanderv @stephenhaney @stevelauda_ @figma @paper It really has to do with @paper being fully built to be the AI-first and Figma is trying to evolve into that but there is too much on it to be fixed to be able reach that

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@tirumalab_ch @sanderv @stephenhaney @stevelauda_ @figma @paper It could be if you are asking to use pre-existing components without clear context or the file structure, or even the way the tokens are structured 🫠

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@stevelauda_ Because Figma was never built to be AI-optimized

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

@onuro Figma Console MCP is waaaay better

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Most people are optimizing for token count. Wrong metric. Precision per token is what matters. One well-structured constraint beats a paragraph of explanation every time.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Your design system shouldn't be locked to one agent or one platform. Building something to fix that.

[J. Alejandro Bauer @jaobauer]

Betting everything on a single markdown file (design.md / skill.md) will let you down. Real quality, consistency, and efficiency require a proper system — not one file.