Dispatches from the
agentic frontier
News, analysis, and insights from the world of agentic experience design. Stay ahead of the shift from tools to trusted collaborators.
Agent Enablement — The Operational Layer
Your agents aren't underperforming because the model is weak. They're underperforming because everything around them — context, tools, playbooks, feedback — was never built. The four pillars, a toolbox, and a maturity ladder.
The Two-Layer Stack: AUX Above Microsoft's Agent Governance Toolkit
Microsoft just shipped the deterministic enforcement layer for autonomous agents. AGT makes the agent incapable of misbehaving. AUX makes the user willing to keep using it. Both necessary. Neither sufficient. Here's how they stack.
Agent-First API Design — The New Developer Experience
For thirty years, API-first meant designing for human developers. In the agentic era, the primary consumer of your API is an autonomous system. Six principles, a CRM worked example, and a ten-point checklist for the new DX.
What Is Agentic User Experience (AUX)?
The AUX Start Pack — manifesto, six foundational patterns, eight principles, ten heuristics, a four-stage trust architecture, and TrustKit. Everything a team needs to design for agents, memory, and trust.
Advertising Agencies Are About to Hit the Agentic Trust Crisis
AI is moving from generation to delegation. Most agencies are not ready for the question that follows: can we trust this agent to act inside this workflow, for this client, without damaging the brand?
Launching Auxfirst on GitHub: Introducing TrustKit
We're launching Auxfirst on GitHub and introducing TrustKit — a foundational trust abstraction layer for AI agents, distributed systems, and verifiable communication between services.
10 Heuristics for Agentic Experience
A visual reference for the 10 core heuristics of AUX design — covering trust, autonomy, memory, transparency, and control. Download and use as a design checklist or team alignment tool.
Agentic User Experience
Understanding the next interface paradigm. Software is shifting from tools you operate to systems that act, agents that decide, and software that works for you. The unit of interaction is no longer a click — it's an intention.
AUX Examples: Structured Agent Flows
Eight real-world AUX examples covering sales, support, fitness, developer tools, GTM, finance, onboarding, and content — each demonstrating intent handshakes, progressive autonomy, and trust design.
Beyond Greedy Reasoning: An AUX Framework for Long-Horizon Agent Reliability
Step-by-step reasoning behaves like a greedy local policy. Long-horizon reliability needs explicit lookahead, backward value propagation, and limited commitment with replanning — solved experientially through AUX.
Designing Agentic User Experiences (AUX)
From desired outcomes to AX to spec and production system. A complete design methodology covering trust layers, six design primitives, interaction patterns, and three implementation approaches.
The Core Mismatch
One-agent multi-user chaos vs. what AUX assumes: a multi-actor, governed system. How AUX architecture solves the fundamental problems of role-agnosticism, memory leaks, and conflict resolution in current LLM setups.