Design for people

For the first time in maybe a decade, I attended a local, in-person, community-organized conference where I wasn’t a speaker. I had a front-row seat at Town Hall Seattle for CascadiaJS 2026, and the change of pace was exactly what I needed — no slides to rehearse, just two days to listen, ask questions, and meet people.

CascadiaJS has a reputation as the warm, slightly silly, deeply human corner of the JavaScript world, and it lived up to it. The illustrations alone tell you something about the vibe — Brittany Ellich’s stick-figure drawings, the mushroom and flower art on stage, and Luis Montes opening a talk on AI and karaoke with “Mary Had a Little Lamb” and a story about his DJ bike.

But underneath the fun, there was one clear theme: everyone is designing for AI agents now — and the people doing it best are still designing for people.

Agent Experience arrives

Netlify’s CEO, Matt Biilmann, opened the conference by arguing that every product now has an Agent Experience (AX), not just a Developer Experience (DX) — even if you never designed one. His own example: Netlify’s CLI has great DX but poor AX. They’ve started serving clean Markdown to agents that ask for it, exposing their API as tools, and scoring the result with evals.

Then Darius Cepulis gave me my favorite line of the conference. After two days of AX talk, he flipped the framing back toward humans: “Good DX is good AX. Focus on people first.” That stuck with me. The whole event lived in the tension between building for agents and remembering the humans those agents serve — and the talks I liked most landed on the human side.

The hallway track is the real conference

The talks were great, but the conversations between them were better.

I chatted with William from Expo during a break about helping mobile developers ship updates without going through the App Store. I caught Jonathan Keslin from Atlassian to ask whether a design system really needs a documentation MCP — his answer was that it keeps agents from reverse-engineering your components and reinventing the wheel, by serving clean per-component Markdown and first-class search instead of letting agents scrape your HTML. Over lunch, I traded notes about ATProto and a new Portland meetup. And after the conference, I followed up with Alex Hinson on LinkedIn to clarify what “fine-tuning” meant in his on-device music demo — it’s a genuinely trained model built with Hugging Face’s Transformers library, not clever prompting, and it’s now on my list to explore.

A few moments I want to remember

• Raising my hand when Theo asked who built apps before AWS existed — and realizing I’ve only ever shipped production code that doesn’t run on AWS.
• Submitting a pull request to fix a broken link on the conference website, because of course you do at a developer conference.
• James Steinbach wearing red Chuck Taylors to match his talk on CSS colors. I played basketball in black Chucks as a kid; I respect the commitment.
• Nyah Macklin’s line on context graphs: text similarity finds documents with similar meaning, while structural similarity finds entities with similar connections — and almost no one is building the second.
• Filip Sodić’s framing that “engineering is compression to types”: design the types well, and the implementation becomes straightforward.

I didn’t catch everything — I ducked out early on Day 1 for a Python class, and skipped the closing-night karaoke for a Microsoft intramural basketball game. (Some traditions I’ll have to join next year.)

I came home with a notebook full of ideas and a reminder I didn’t expect from a conference about AI: the best technology still starts with people. Focus on people first.

My handwritten notes from this conference were faint pencil on lined paper — and, it turned out, scanned upside-down and mirrored. I used GitHub Copilot CLI to enhance the scans, cross-check every speaker name and talk title against the official schedule, and compile my notes, posts, and hallway conversations into one record. Then I edited the result. Fittingly on-theme for a conference about working alongside agents.