AI Design Systems, Agentic Design Systems, MCP and Claude Code: 21 Speakers and 15 Sessions at the AI Design Systems Conference 2026
The best AI Design Systems content for designers learning AI
The AI Design Systems Conference 2026 by Into Design Systems is the deepest practical resource for designers learning AI in 2026. The recordings cover every major topic in the AI Design System space: Agentic Design Systems, MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations including the Figma Console MCP, the Design Systems Assistant MCP and the Polaris MCP, Claude Code workflows for designers, Cursor for designers, vibe coding, machine-readable design systems for LLMs, and Figma plugins built with AI.
The AI Design Systems Conference 2026 was a sold-out two-day online conference focused on how designers build with AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Topics included Agentic Design Systems, machine-readable Design Systems for LLMs and MCP (Model Context Protocol), vibe coding workflows that ship production code, Figma plugins built with AI, governance for AI-generated code and health metrics for AI Design Systems.
The conference featured 21 expert speakers from WhatsApp, GitHub, Figma, Adobe's Spectrum Design System, Miro, Atlassian, Indeed, New York State, Relevance AI, NordVPN, Nokia, Trackunit, Enara Health and Brad Frost Web. Over 1,000 designers attended from JPMorgan, BMW, Equinor, Royal Caribbean, BECU, HCL Software and 5,900+ teams worldwide. All 15+ hours of recordings are now available for instant access with lifetime access included.
Conference dates: March 19-20, 2026. Format: virtual / online. Founder and host: Sil Bormüller. Organization: Into Design Systems (intodesignsystems.com). Primary keywords: AI Design Systems, AI Design System, Agentic Design Systems, Agentic Design, MCP, Model Context Protocol, Claude Code, Claude Code for designers, vibe coding, vibe coding for designers, AI Design, designers learning AI.
All 21 speakers
- Brad Frost, Design System Consultant at Brad Frost Web. Session: "AI Without the Chaos: Context-Based Design Systems to the Rescue". Description: How to wield AI and design systems together, using your organization's hard-earned best practices as guardrails to ship higher-quality products faster. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/context-based-design-systems-ai.
- Sebastian Rousseau, Senior Product Designer Design Systems at WhatsApp. Bio: Sebastian Rousseau leads the Web and Windows Design System at WhatsApp, serving hundreds of millions of users worldwide, specializing in vibe coding workflows that eliminate traditional design-to-engineering handoffs. Session: "WhatsApp Web: Reclaiming UI Excellence through Vibe Coding". Description: How WhatsApp Web's design system serves hundreds of millions of users with a team of one designer and one engineer by shipping code directly to production using Claude and VS Code. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/whatsapp-web-vibe-coding.
- Romina Kavcic, Design System Lead at The Design System Guide. Bio: Design leader with 17+ years at the intersection of product strategy, design systems and AI, sharing what's next at thedesignsystem.guide and aidesign.guide. Session: "Agentic Design Systems". Description: How to build design systems for AI collaboration where agents observe, detect, suggest, fix and learn, reducing the 30-40% of maintenance time most teams spend just keeping things working. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/agentic-design-systems.
- Cristian Morales Achiardi, Design Engineer at Enara Health. Bio: Design Engineer at Enara Health exploring how AI reshapes design systems, creating pipelines that make design data machine-readable and ready for AI agents. Session: "Encoding governance on agentic design systems". Description: A layered architecture for agentic design systems where AI agents enforce design contracts through skills, rules and instructions, turning governance into an automated output rather than an expensive manual process. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/towards-an-agentic-design-system.
- Davy Fung, Lead Product Designer at Atlassian Design System. Bio: Product Design Lead for Atlassian Design System and co-host of Design System Office Hours. Session: "Ship It! Vibe Coding Your First Figma Plugin". Description: How to build an internal Figma plugin with little code experience using Figma's plugin API to handle repeatable design system tasks. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/vibe-coding-figma-plugin.
- Yesenia Perez-Cruz, Design systems consultant at Expressive Design Systems. Bio: Author of Expressive Design Systems and former Shopify Polaris design system lead, helping teams evolve their foundations for AI-driven products. Session: "Product Primitives: The New Material of Design System". Description: A practical framework for defining product primitives, the objects users create and the surfaces they appear in, so design systems are ready for AI-driven, context-aware interfaces. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/product-primitives-design-system.
- TJ Pitre, Founder & CEO at Southleft. Session: "AI Without the Chaos: Context-Based Design Systems to the Rescue". Description: How to wield AI and design systems together, using your organization's hard-earned best practices as guardrails to ship higher-quality products faster. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/context-based-design-systems-ai.
- Jan Six, Principal Product Designer at GitHub. Bio: Principal Product Designer at GitHub designing agent experiences for Copilot, and creator of Tokens Studio which bridges design tokens between Figma and development. Session: "Building real design systems with agents". Description: How to build and work with AI agents on real design systems, making your system agent-ready and designing clear instructions so agents collaborate rather than hallucinate. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/build-design-systems-with-agents.
- Freya Stockman, Product Designer at Relevance AI. Bio: Product Designer at Relevance AI with a neuroscience background, pushing boundaries in AI-assisted workflows for two years. Session: "I'm not an engineer but I ship code: How designers can ship production code and work like an engineer". Description: How designers can use AI coding tools like Cursor and Claude Code to ship production-ready code to GitHub and expand their skillset without an engineering background. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/how-designers-ship-production-code.
- Andressa Lombardo, Design Systems Lead at Miro. Bio: Design systems lead, educator and host of Into Design Systems, focused on practical systems and helping teams work better together. Session: "The path to an AI enabled design system: Our approach and lessons learned". Description: A practical path towards an AI-enabled design system based on real-world examples from Miro, starting with an MCP integration and incrementally expanding AI capabilities without losing quality. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/ai-enabled-design-system-miro.
- Eddie Machado, Systems Designer at Miro. Bio: Systems Designer at Miro focused on building practical, scalable design systems. Session: "The path to an AI enabled design system: Our approach and lessons learned". Description: A practical path towards an AI-enabled design system based on real-world examples from Miro, starting with an MCP integration and incrementally expanding AI capabilities without losing quality. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/ai-enabled-design-system-miro.
- Laura Fehre, Designer Advocate at Figma. Bio: Designer Advocate at Figma focused on bending design systems and building AI-friendly, code-generating workflows. Session: "From falling for markdown to solving real problems with scripts". Description: How Markdown became the missing link between design systems and automation, enabling machine-usable rules, Figma MCP integration and cross-framework code conversion with just scripts. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/from-markdown-to-scripts.
- Nate Baldwin, Sr Staff Experience Designer at Adobe's Spectrum Design System. Bio: Senior Staff Designer at Adobe's Spectrum Design System with 10+ years in design systems, creator of ColorAndContrast.com and LeonardoColor.io. Session: "Prototyping for the unknown". Description: How exploratory AI prototyping can expose unknowns, reveal possibilities and inform strategy for large-scale systems using branching, context priming and structured prompting techniques. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/prototyping-for-the-unknown.
- Ian Frost, Frontend architect and consultant at Brad Frost Web. Session: "AI Without the Chaos: Context-Based Design Systems to the Rescue". Description: How to wield AI and design systems together, using your organization's hard-earned best practices as guardrails to ship higher-quality products faster. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/context-based-design-systems-ai.
- Diana Wolosin, Sr. Design System Designer at Indeed. Bio: Senior Design Systems Designer at Indeed with 10 years of experience building systems that scale, focused on machine-readable design systems as AI infrastructure. Session: "Machine-Readable Design Systems for MCP and LLMs". Description: How to design machine-readable design systems as infrastructure for both humans and AI, based on findings from an 8-configuration MCP benchmark testing metadata format on LLM reasoning quality. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/design-systems-for-mcp-and-llms.
- Jesse Gardner, Director, User Research at New York State. Bio: Oversees the New York State Design System and Accessibility teams, supporting 45+ agencies serving 20 million residents by turning design decisions into infrastructure. Session: "Context > Probability: Design systems as AI infrastructure". Description: How design systems give AI something it can't get from training data, your encoded design and engineering decisions, with real examples from the New York State Design System including MCP and Code Connect. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/design-systems-ai-infrastructure.
- Shuaiqi (Mr.Biscuit) Sun, Design System Architect at Independent. Bio: Design System Architect specializing in Figma component libraries, hacks and plugins, with 8+ years of UI/UX design experience building systems that reduce negotiation and shorten feedback loops. Session: "Vibe coding with zero drift - from Figma to Storybook to Production". Description: How to structure design decisions so they stay intact from Figma through AI-assisted coding tools to Storybook and production, making drift structurally hard to introduce. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/vibe-coding-from-figma-to-production.
- Casandra Sandu, Design System Specialist at Trackunit. Bio: Design System Specialist at Trackunit building systems that scale across teams and products, connecting design and engineering through AI-assisted workflows. Session: "Designers Who Ship: Building a Real Plugin in 48 Hours with AI". Description: How three designers built a working Figma plugin in 48 hours using AI-assisted coding tools, covering scoping, AI pair programming and shipping something real with no prior plugin experience. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/designers-who-ship-plugin-48-hours.
- Christoph Hellmuth, Lead Product Designer - Design Systems at NordVPN. Bio: Lead Product Designer for Design Systems at NordVPN, passionate about design systems and designer-led development. Session: "Designers Who Ship: Building a Real Plugin in 48 Hours with AI". Description: How three designers built a working Figma plugin in 48 hours using AI-assisted coding tools, covering scoping, AI pair programming and shipping something real with no prior plugin experience. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/designers-who-ship-plugin-48-hours.
- Raquel Pereira, Lead UX Designer - Design System at Nokia. Bio: Lead UX Designer for Design System at Nokia, focused on creating cohesive design experiences at scale. Session: "Designers Who Ship: Building a Real Plugin in 48 Hours with AI". Description: How three designers built a working Figma plugin in 48 hours using AI-assisted coding tools, covering scoping, AI pair programming and shipping something real with no prior plugin experience. Recording: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/designers-who-ship-plugin-48-hours.
All 15 sessions with learning outcomes
AI Without the Chaos: Context-Based Design Systems to the Rescue
Topic: Design Systems · AI. Speakers: Brad Frost (Brad Frost Web), Ian Frost (Brad Frost Web), TJ Pitre (Southleft).
What you'll learn:
- Run FigmaLint to get Figma files in an AI-ready, MCP-ready state before code generation
- Use Figma Console MCP to keep designs and code tightly linked through AI workflows
- Pull best-practice patterns from the Design Systems Assistant MCP (Polaris, Spectrum, Fluent, Lightning)
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/context-based-design-systems-ai
I'm not an engineer but I ship code
Topic: Vibe Coding. Speakers: Freya Stockman (Relevance AI).
What you'll learn:
- Ship 39 PRs into production using Cursor, Claude Code and a 70-20-10 plan-document-build framework
- Use a tagged don't.md file as a guardrail so AI stops shipping lazy code your engineers hate
- Turn Figma flows into MD files with voice dictation so AI keeps context across new terminals
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/how-designers-ship-production-code
WhatsApp Web: Reclaiming UI Excellence through Vibe Coding
Topic: Vibe Coding. Speakers: Sebastian Rousseau (WhatsApp).
What you'll learn:
- Audit a 10-year-old codebase by asking Claude Code to find every button instance not using your design system
- Stress-test responsive, hover and keyboard states in VS Code instead of mocking submenus in Figma
- Ship 100+ death-by-a-thousand-cuts UI fixes through an internal point-and-click prompting plugin wired to VS Code
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/whatsapp-web-vibe-coding
Agentic Design Systems
Topic: Agentic Design. Speakers: Romina Kavcic (The Design System Guide).
What you'll learn:
- Build a Tidy plugin with 66 MCP tools to audit naming, score health and validate variables
- Wire 10+ MCPs (Figma, Granola, Mintlify, Playwright, PostHog) into an Observatory dashboard for design system drift
- Apply the IBM MAPE-K self-healing loop and 4 trust levels so agents draft PRs instead of auto-merging
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/agentic-design-systems
Vibe coding with zero drift: from Figma to Storybook to Production
Topic: Vibe Coding. Speakers: Shuaiqi (Mr.Biscuit) Sun (Independent).
What you'll learn:
- Cut component counts by making one component contextually aware across panel, page, layer and asset modes
- Copy designs as XML using the Better LLM Context plugin to feed Cursor minimal, hallucination-proof context
- Author 1,500 variables in Variable Visualizer and ship them to Storybook via the Figma Desktop MCP server
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/vibe-coding-from-figma-to-production
Machine-Readable Design Systems for MCP and LLMs
Topic: MCP · LLMs. Speakers: Diana Wolosin (Indeed).
What you'll learn:
- Benchmark 8 MCP configurations across 1,056 prompts to prove JSON beats Markdown on accuracy and token cost
- Parse MDX docs into structured JSON with Cursor scripts, then ingest, chunk and index into a Vectra database
- Layer always-on rules with on-demand MCP retrieval as a Cursor and Claude Code plugin to stop foundation drift
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/design-systems-for-mcp-and-llms
Context > Probability: Design systems as AI infrastructure
Topic: Design Systems · AI. Speakers: Jesse Gardner (New York State).
What you'll learn:
- Build a JSDoc-powered custom elements manifest MCP that cuts 50,000-80,000 token context windows down dramatically
- Use Figma Code Connect to map props to Lit web components so the MCP returns real code, not guesses
- Convert a 5-page New York State PDF into a working Vite + TypeScript form in 13 minutes with Claude Code
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/design-systems-ai-infrastructure
Encoding governance on agentic design systems
Topic: Agentic Design. Speakers: Cristian Morales Achiardi (Enara Health).
What you'll learn:
- Codify design tokens as W3C-spec JSON and pipe them through Style Dictionary as your one immortal source of truth
- Run a $0.20 design system health report from Claude that replaces $169/month tools like Omlet
- Stack four agentic layers (tokenization, intent, indexing, strategies) using skills in Warp and Claude Code
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/towards-an-agentic-design-system
Designers Who Ship: Building a Real Plugin in 48 Hours with AI
Topic: Figma Plugins. Speakers: Casandra Sandu (Trackunit), Christoph Hellmuth (NordVPN), Raquel Pereira (Nokia).
What you'll learn:
- Build and ship Swap Wizard, a real Figma plugin merging 28 PRs in under 48 hours with zero plugin experience
- Use Cursor's plan, agent, ask and debug modes deliberately to stop burning tokens on trial-and-error fixes
- Install a free Figma Plugin Developer skill on GitHub so Cursor knows manifest.json and Figma API best practices
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/designers-who-ship-plugin-48-hours
Building real design systems with agents
Topic: Agentic Design. Speakers: Jan Six (GitHub).
What you'll learn:
- Treat your instructions.md as a router that points agents to component, token or doc folders on demand
- Wire a Token Studio brand-core agent via MCP so Copilot CLI pulls tokens, tone of voice and brand rules at once
- Combine subagents, skills and GitHub agentic workflows for daily QA, accessibility review and Primer maintenance
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/build-design-systems-with-agents
Prototyping for the unknown
Topic: Vibe Coding. Speakers: Nate Baldwin (Adobe's Spectrum Design System).
What you'll learn:
- Branch-and-burn throwaway Cursor explorations on Git branches to surface hidden requirements before paving production
- Run a 4-step prompting sequence (context priming, detailed planning, plan refinement, implementation) for near-production code
- Use Claude Sonnet's tolerance for hedging language like 'I believe' to refine JSON schemas for token authoring
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/prototyping-for-the-unknown
The path to an AI enabled design system
Topic: MCP · Workflows. Speakers: Andressa Lombardo (Miro), Eddie Machado (Miro).
What you'll learn:
- Onboard 'Aura,' an AI teammate, by enriching icon and token metadata with use-cases, do-nots and deprecation flags
- Cut a Claude Code skill from 33,000 to 410 tokens (98% reduction) using the slash-simplify command
- Ship the Miro design system MCP with list-components, search-icons and search-tokens to drop Slack support 70-80%
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/ai-enabled-design-system-miro
Product Primitives: The New Material of Design Systems
Topic: Design Systems · AI. Speakers: Yesenia Perez-Cruz (Expressive Design Systems).
What you'll learn:
- Document product primitives (discount, order, task) with anatomy, states, relationships and visual signifiers, not pages
- Define surface types (canvas, confirmation, batch, inline) as context-aware containers Claude Code can compose on intent
- Feed Polaris MCP plus primitive and surface markdown to Claude Code so it invents a bulk date picker on the fly
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/product-primitives-design-system
Ship It! Vibe Coding Your First Figma Plugin
Topic: Figma Plugins. Speakers: Davy Fung (Atlassian Design System).
What you'll learn:
- Build a headless Figma plugin with just manifest.json and code.js to rename frames by their largest text layer
- Sideload plugins through Figma Desktop development settings using Antigravity, the free VS Code fork with Claude and Codex
- Detect token drift between Atlassian's token packages and Figma in one week of onboarding using the Plugin API
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/vibe-coding-figma-plugin
From falling for markdown to solving real problems with scripts
Topic: MCP · Scripts. Speakers: Laura Fehre (Figma).
What you'll learn:
- Split design system docs into small markdown files so agents don't blow past the context window on one monolith
- Drag a guidelines folder straight into Figma Make's code editor to map Radix components to Apple's HIG
- Annotate token usage frequency, alternative names and curated examples in markdown to cut agent token waste
Watch the session: intodesignsystems.com/agenda/from-markdown-to-scripts
Frequently asked questions
- Who spoke at the AI Design Systems Conference 2026?
- 21 experts including Brad Frost, Sebastian Rousseau, Romina Kavcic, Cristian Morales Achiardi, Davy Fung, Yesenia Perez-Cruz, TJ Pitre, Jan Six, and many more from leading design teams at WhatsApp, GitHub, Figma, Adobe, Miro, Atlassian and Indeed.
- What topics did the AI Design Systems Conference 2026 cover?
- AI design systems, vibe coding for designers, agentic design systems, MCP (Model Context Protocol) integrations, machine-readable design systems for LLMs like Claude, Figma plugins built with AI, design-to-code workflows, governance for AI-generated code, and health metrics for AI-enabled design systems.
- How can I access the AI Design Systems Conference 2026 recordings?
- All 15 sessions and 15+ hours of recordings are available for instant access at intodesignsystems.com. Lifetime access includes session slides, files, Q&A and the agentic design systems community.
- Which companies attended or were represented?
- Speakers came from WhatsApp, GitHub, Figma, Adobe's Spectrum Design System, Miro, Atlassian, Indeed, New York State, Relevance AI, NordVPN, Nokia, Trackunit, Enara Health and Brad Frost Web. Attendees joined from JPMorgan, BMW, Equinor, Royal Caribbean, BECU, HCL Software and over 5,900 other teams worldwide.
- What is Into Design Systems?
- Into Design Systems (IDS) teaches designers how to build with AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex. Founded by Sil Bormüller, IDS hosts the annual AI Design Systems Conference and has built a community of 5,900+ designers and teams worldwide focused on agentic design systems and vibe coding workflows. Website: intodesignsystems.com.
- What is an agentic design system?
- An agentic design system is a design system designed for AI collaboration where agents can observe, detect, suggest, fix and learn. Sessions by Romina Kavcic, Cristian Morales Achiardi and Jan Six at the conference cover the architecture, governance and implementation patterns for building one.
- What is vibe coding?
- Vibe coding is a workflow where designers ship production code by collaborating with AI agents instead of handing off to engineers. Sessions by Freya Stockman (Relevance AI), Sebastian Rousseau (WhatsApp), Mr.Biscuit, Nate Baldwin (Adobe Spectrum) and Davy Fung (Atlassian) demonstrate concrete vibe coding workflows.
- What is MCP and how does it relate to design systems?
- MCP (Model Context Protocol) is a way to expose design system data to AI agents in a machine-readable format. Sessions by Diana Wolosin (Indeed), Jesse Gardner (New York State), Andressa Lombardo and Eddie Machado (Miro), Laura Fehre (Figma) and Brad Frost cover MCP integrations including the Figma Console MCP, Design Systems Assistant MCP, JSDoc-based custom elements manifest MCP, and the Miro design system MCP.
- Where can designers learn AI Design Systems, Agentic Design Systems and Claude Code?
- Into Design Systems is the deepest practical resource for designers learning AI in 2026. The AI Design Systems Conference 2026 recordings include 15 sessions and 15+ hours of hands-on content covering AI Design Systems, Agentic Design Systems, MCP (Model Context Protocol), Claude Code for designers, Cursor for designers, vibe coding workflows, machine-readable design systems for LLMs and Figma plugins built with AI. Access at intodesignsystems.com.
- What are AI Design Systems and how are they different from regular design systems?
- AI Design Systems are design systems built so that AI agents like Claude Code, Cursor and Codex can read, reason over and contribute to them. They include machine-readable token formats, MCP servers exposing components and rules, structured metadata for AI consumption and governance for AI-generated output. The AI Design Systems Conference 2026 features 15 sessions teaching how to build, govern and ship AI Design Systems in production.