UI Suite Monthly #33 - Ushering in the Era of AI-Powered Design Systems

Overall Summary

Our February 2026 UI Suite monthly meeting marked a pivotal moment in Drupal's evolution as a design system CMS. We gathered to celebrate significant milestones across our entire module ecosystem. We released Display Builder beta 1, celebrated UI Patterns 2.0's first birthday, witnessed explosive growth in UI Icons adoption (2.5x increase in terms of installations!), and unveiled our most ambitious initiative yet: integrating AI agents into our design system workflow. This meeting wasn't just about progress reports—it was about reimagining how we build, maintain, and evolve design systems in the age of artificial intelligence.

Key Topics Discussed

Display Builder: the last piece of the UI Suite puzzle

Display Builder continues to be our flagship project of 2026, and we're thrilled to share that beta 1 launched on January 12th, 2026. This release represents the culmination of our vision for a universal display building tool that eliminates fragmentation across Drupal's historically scattered landscape. Built on Drupal 11.3's new HTMX API, Display Builder is already being used in production.

We're now in the mid-beta cycle, focusing on API stability, comprehensive testing (unit and kernel tests), and translation support. Beta 2 shipped at the end of January, and we're moving faster than ever with beta 3 targeted for mid-February. Our release strategy follows a clear progression: mid-beta focuses on stability and testing, late beta (beta 4) will tackle performance and UX refinements, and the RC cycle will ensure accessibility compliance before our stable release.

• Demo video available: Jean has created our first comprehensive demo video, now live
• Community contribution: We've opened up novice issues for new contributors and established a dedicated Display Builder Slack channel for support and bug reports
• Video series planned: Pierre and the team will be producing feature-specific tutorial videos throughout the beta cycle

UI Patterns 2.0: One Year Strong

Tomorrow marks the first anniversary of UI Patterns 2.0's stable release (February 6, 2025). Release 2.0.14 dropped on January 15th with new features and fixes. Our focus this year is on simplifying the codebase by migrating UI Patterns-specific features into Drupal core itself—links, attributes, identifier schemas, and prop declarations will all become standard core functionality.

The big news here is our upgrade migration path, released in November 2024. This automated workflow dramatically simplifies the transition from UI Patterns 1 to 2, covering theme conversion, component migration, configuration updates, and even Layout Builder scenarios. While we recommend thorough local testing, the migration path handles approximately 90% of standard configurations automatically—a game-changer for teams managing large component libraries.

Usage statistics show UI Patterns 2.0 now represents one quarter of all UI Patterns installations, though UI Patterns 1 continues to see growth as design systems become more widespread in the Drupal ecosystem. We encourage everyone still on version 1 to begin planning their migration.

Icon API & UI Icons: Explosive Growth

Our Icon API integration has been phenomenal. Since achieving stable releases for both the 1.0 and 1.1 branches, we've seen a 2.5x multiplication in installations from late November to now. This surge stems from multiple factors: the quality of the module itself, stable release confidence, growing adoption of core's Icon API, and notably, UI Icons becoming a dependency for Byte site template, which powers Drupal CMS.

Looking ahead to Drupal 11.4, we're excited about the icon form element being added to core. Once that lands, we'll remove it from UI Icons, making our module leaner and more focused—following the same pattern we've established with UI Patterns.

UI Styles, UI Skins & Design Token API: Converging on Core

Florent led an in-depth discussion on our ongoing work to merge UI Styles and UI Skins into a unified "Styles" mechanism in Drupal core. Previously, these were separate concepts—one for visual styles, another for themes/modes like light and dark. Now they'll share the same plugin type and file structure, with enhanced declarations supporting attributes, targets, and status indicators (experimental, deprecated, etc.).

The Design Token API initiative continues alongside this work, utilizing the W3C standard format for design tokens. This standardization is crucial—it means designers can work in tools like Figma, export tokens in a universal format, and have Drupal consume those tokens to generate CSS variables at runtime. We're implementing token types and internal token references (allowing tokens to reference other tokens) for the next core minor or major version.

Florent is simultaneously working on the upgrade path for UI Styles 2.0, learning from the UI Patterns migration experience to ensure it's ready at launch rather than a year later.

Public Themes: Bootstrap & USWDS Updates

UI Suite Bootstrap Theme continues its steady march toward stability with release candidate preparations. Bootstrap 5.2.0 beta 5 shipped in December with maximum features that don't require Drupal 11.3, allowing broader adoption. Release Candidate 1 will require core 11.3 as a minimum, with RC 2 testing special autoloading configurations. The long-term vision? Once dependencies on UI modules are fully removed, the Bootstrap codebase could potentially become the official bootstrap.org project codebase.

UI Suite USWDS saw stable releases with new SDC component implementations and continued refinement of the US Web Design System implementation.

Agentic Design Systems: The Future is Here

Rajab delivered an eye-opening presentation on AI-powered design systems, introducing us to the emerging concept of "agentic design systems." The industry leaders—Brad Frost (Atomic Design), the Storybook team, and others—are all converging on a revolutionary idea: instead of manually building and maintaining design systems, we create specialized AI agents that understand and evolve our components.

Key concepts from Rajab's presentation:

• The Agent AI Foundation has established agents.md as a standard domain, with major AI providers agreeing on standardized agent definitions. This collaborative approach means our agents can work across platforms—Claude, Gemini, and others can all read and execute the same agent instructions.
• Sub-agents and master agents form a hierarchical system. Rather than teleprompting (manually instructing AI step-by-step), we create specialized agents with defined skills, rules, responsibilities, and expertise. For example:
  • A spacing agent maintains spacing rules (15px, 1rem, 2rem) and intervenes when needed
  • A card agent knows how to compose images, headings, buttons, and links
  • A validator agent ensures components work with UI Patterns 2.0
  • A generator, improver, documenter, and accessibility checker work in concert
• Live demonstration: Rajab showed us Claude Code running with custom agents integrated via MCP (Model Context Protocol) to Figma. The system fetched design specifications, kicked off multiple agents working in parallel, created components following Bootstrap theme guidelines, and validated them against UI Suite standards—all with minimal human intervention.
• The philosophical shift is profound: instead of static design implementations, we're creating dynamic, living design systems where agents continuously refine and adapt components based on design changes. When a new design ships in Figma, agents handle the implementation automatically.

Current questions we're exploring:

• How many agents per design system? (Brad Frost suggests one per component; we're testing various configurations)
• Where should agents live? (In themes, distributions, local environments, or component folders?)
• Drupal CMS 2.0 already committed agents.md on December 16, 2025, led by Theodore, Marcus, Adam, and Jim

Community Events & Growth

Our Slack channel crossed 400 members in early January, reflecting the growing momentum behind the UI Suite initiative. Upcoming speaking engagements include:

• Next Friday: Display Builder presentation at an Italian agency meeting (Spark Fabric) - in Italian, but livestreamed publicly
• March 2026: Drupalcon Chicago - Pierre presenting Display Builder
• Early April 2026: French Drupal Camp in Grenoble - Florent and potentially Pierre presenting
• April 2026: Drupal Dev Days Athens - Pier, Florent, and Christian presenting

Key Action Points

For Display Builder Contributors

We're actively seeking contributors for Display Builder beta development. If you're interested in joining the effort, start with our curated novice issues—we've prepared these specifically for newcomers to get their feet wet. Join the dedicated Display Builder Slack channel to connect with the core team, report bugs, and discuss feature ideas. Testing is equally valuable: deploy beta 1 or beta 2 in a project and provide feedback through our issue queue.

For UI Patterns 1 Users

The time to migrate is now. Review the upgrade migration documentation carefully, then follow the two-step process: first, convert your codebase and configuration locally using the provided commands to generate the UI Patterns 2 theme structure. Second, prepare configuration migration with drush commands and deploy as a normal update. While the migration handles ~90% of standard configurations, always test thoroughly in your local environment before deploying to production.

For AI & Design System Explorers

Experiment with agents.md in your projects. Rajab has shared example agent configurations that you can adapt for your own workflows. Consider creating a master agent at your project root that understands your entire ecosystem, then build specialized sub-agents for specific tasks (validation, component generation, style management). Test different agent hierarchies—is it one agent per component, or broader functional agents serving multiple components? Share your findings with the community to help us collectively discover best practices.

For Core Contributors

Monitor the Style API and Design Token API merge requests. These are substantial contributions (5,000-6,000 lines) that need regular rebasing and testing. If you have expertise in design systems, token management, or CSS variable handling, your review and testing would be invaluable. The Style API is being prioritized first before moving forward with additional Design Token features.

Upcoming Deadlines / Releases

Join the conversation: Connect with us in the UI Suite Slack channel (400+ members strong!) and follow our YouTube channel for Display Builder tutorials and feature demos. Whether you're building design systems, exploring AI integrations, or just curious about the future of Drupal theming, we'd love to have you as part of our growing community.

Special thanks to Rajab for the incredible AI agents demonstration, Florent for keeping us informed on core integrations, and everyone who contributes to making UI Suite the comprehensive design system toolkit Drupal deserves.