Found. 2026-09-21, by Dexter Washington
The old reason a website went stale was that adding a page meant a designer, a developer, a ticket, and then two weeks going back and forth with a stakeholder on content and approvals. That's still the situation at plenty of companies today. At plenty of others it stopped being the case over the last year or so, and now teams can get pages up fast without asking for permission.
Both groups end up with a site that doesn't work to the best of its ability, we've seen this a lot and it's interesting. You'd think offloading work to agents would mean smoother production, faster results, etc and in many cases fast does not equal ease.
Pages that get made independently start to look like they came from different companies. It happens in small increments. A new page needs a card and there isn't a card component, so now there are four card styles, a new event page uses a heading size that exists nowhere else on the site. The hero buttons pick up a second corner radius, and section padding is all over the place, you get the idea.
I wouldn't blame anyone for this, it's a task managing large enterprise level websites even for someone who knows the ins and outs of the company. But they compound in a specific way: every new variant makes the next decision harder, because there's no longer a source of truth.
Generated pages accelerate this more than written copy does, because a layout contains many more small decisions than a sentence. Spacing, hierarchy, the treatment of an image, how a list renders, what happens at a narrow width. Left unspecified, each of those gets resolved fresh every time, plausibly and differently.
What a visitor takes from it isn't an 'inconsistent design system.' It's a vague impression that the company is uncoordinated, which is a reasonable thing to infer from a site that looks different from section to section.
When producing a page took more workload, a design system mostly saved time. Now that producing a page takes a prompt or two, the system is the only place the decisions live. Which spacing value is the spacing value, what a page of this type contains, etc. Speed on top of that compounds, and speed without direction produces more surface to be inconsistent across the website than website managers can catch. Honestly, this even happens without AI.
In an ideal situation, experts create the initial designs, the design systems, development environment with good judgement, experience, and understanding of business goals. Then you create a system that AI can thrive in, which looks like feeding it all of those pieces and teaching it how to use the system.
We came to this from years of enterprise product and website work. Everyone in Crafted has spent years as senior or lead designers and engineers working on products where the design system was the reason a team could ship at all, so shipping the rules next to the pages is close to instinct now.
We deliver the constraints along with the site. The repo a client gets has the design system, the components, the page types and a written set of rules about what can and can't be done, sitting in the same place new pages get generated. Someone describes the page they want and the thing building it is already bounded to components that exist, spacing and type that exist, and layouts that were decided on when there was time to think about them. There's no way to introduce a fifth button style by accident, because the fifth button style isn't available.
It doesn't remove people completely though, somebody still decides a page should exist and why. What it removes is the dozen smaller decisions underneath it, each of which is a chance for the site to drift a little further from itself.
The slower version of the same idea is what we built for the USVI Economic Development Authority, where each new program page comes out of templates their team fills in. What's different now is how fast a client can move once they have it.
This is the introduction of our newsletter called Found. It comes out every other week. It's about design in this ever changing landscape for teams and founders building the products and services of tomorrow. We talk about design leadership, UX/UI, getting the most out of agents, and how design influences business outcomes today.
Written by different members of the team.
Subscribe if any of those sound interesting to you.
Take care,Dexter