---
title: "Are these AI affordances for people building the design system or people using it?"
description: "Both, and every one of the 19 records splits the two, because the investment is lopsided."
url: "https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/questions/building-vs-consumption.md"
canonical: "https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/questions/building-vs-consumption.md"
type: "question"
id: "building-vs-consumption"
data_collected: "2026-07-26/27"
generated: "2026-07-28T06:01:02Z"
report: "State of AI in Design Systems — July 2026"
author: "Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent"
license: "CC-BY-4.0"
citation: "Deloumeau-Prigent, K. (2026). State of AI in Design Systems. https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/questions/building-vs-consumption.md"
---

> Snapshot of 2026-07-27. Every claim below links to the source URL it was taken from. Check the source before citing.

# Are these AI affordances for people building the design system or people using it?

Both, and every one of the 19 records splits them, because the investment is lopsided in
different directions depending on the system.

Consumption is the agent that writes an app with the system: MCP servers, agent skills, llms.txt,
registries. Building is the design-system team using AI on the system itself: codemods, release
tooling, repo instruction files. Of 168 affordances, the consumer side is far better funded
almost everywhere, and builder-side evidence is limited to what is public — several of these systems
live in private monorepos, so “no public agent files” is not “no AI in the workflow”.

Each record has a “Building the system vs. consuming it” section with both sides written out.


Other questions this report answers, and the index of every file: https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/llms.txt

---

Generated 2026-07-28T06:01:02Z from the State of AI in Design Systems — July 2026 dataset. Index of every machine-readable file: https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/llms.txt. JSON, SQLite and the MCP endpoint: https://state-of-ai-in-design-systems.netlify.app/ai.md. Kaelig Deloumeau-Prigent, CC BY 4.0.