The End of the Static Screen: Architecting Intent-Driven UX — Gus Iwanaga, commercetools
Generative UI needs more than a component catalog: agents require explicit layout rules, schemas, and design-system constraints to produce stable interfaces across repeated requests.
The same sales-report prompt produced **four different layouts**, with changing labels, KPI cards, charts, and information hierarchy. The proposed declarative path maps intent and tool data to eligible catalog components, then emits a UI specification rendered as native React components.
Treat the component catalog as an agent-facing contract. Define schemas, layout slots, composition rules, interaction patterns, and test queries so the model chooses within a curated design space instead of inventing each screen.
The same sales-report prompt produced **four different layouts**, with changing labels, KPI cards, charts, and information hierarchy. The proposed declarative path maps intent and tool data to eligible catalog components, then emits a UI specification rendered as native React components. Treat the component catalog as an agent-facing contract. Define schemas, layout slots, composition rules, interaction patterns, and test queries so the model chooses within a curated design space instead of inventing each screen. Declarative rendering preserves the design system but does not make composition deterministic. The model can still arrange eligible components poorly, and the talk offers lessons from an experimental product rather than evidence that the approach works reliably at scale.
This moves agent-directed UI from style prompting into a runtime architecture: intent is translated into a constrained specification backed by native components. It confirms that persistent design rules can bound what agents produce, while the four divergent layouts show that catalog eligibility alone does not ensure coherent composition; evaluation and iteration remain necessary.