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October 2026 in review

This image was created using an AI image creation program.

I used AI to help research and write this piece. The opinions are mine.

In October, design system teams built the gates for AI agents’ changes: pull requests, review agents, evals and exception registers. What most organisations still haven’t decided is whose authority stands behind the person at the gate. Most of the writing comes from small teams, but this matters most to enterprise leads, because authority has to be granted to a role, and a process can’t do that.

At Visma, when a product team’s AI agent can’t find what it needs in the Adesy design system, the developer reports the gap from inside their own work, “without opening a form,” Melina Kukkasela writes. The report becomes an issue, then a fix, then a release, and every agent using Adesy gets the better docs. September’s column ended by asking whose name is on the decision when a feature team’s agent files a gap record on Monday. Melina’s piece was the first answer from a team at that scale in what the Design Systems Collective community published in October.