Design systems are in the middle of an identity crisis. The consumers are changing: designers, developers, and now models. The deliverables are changing with them: context, agents, AI tooling, conversational interfaces. The library is no longer the core of what gets shipped.

Cassie has spent the last few months building one of the more complex versions of this in production: a multi-brand, runtime-user-customisable system at Unily, with a four-tier token architecture and documentation supplied as assets for context and agents.

This talk is about what is expanding, what is changing, what is holding, and where the fashionable rhetoric deserves pushback. Including why 100% quality and consistency still matters, and where humans still belong in all of it. Cassie has placed bets on this. By September, she will know the outcome.