Solutions
Design system leads, design managers and heads of engineering whose teams now generate UI with AI tools, and who are seeing near-duplicate components, off-brand screens or review queues that cannot keep up.
Governance used to be about pace: how fast a few designers and engineers could agree on changes. AI changed the volume. When agents can generate a component in seconds, the system gains ten near-duplicates a week unless something stops them. Rules written in a slide deck do not stop an agent. Rules written into the repository, and checked before merge, do. The longer argument is in [Your design system is now a governance problem](/blog-posts/design-system-governance).
The test of governance is whether it changes what ships. Aero writes rules in two forms at once: plain language for your team, and structured metadata and checks for agents. Both come from the same source, so they cannot drift apart. A rule that only lives in a document is a hope. A rule that fails a build is governance.
Some teams already have a capable design system and need only the control layer around it.
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FAQ
Design system governance is the set of rules, owners and review steps that decide what enters a design system, how it changes and who approves the change. It covers contribution, review, versioning, deprecation and the decision record behind each choice. Without it, a component library grows by accident, and every team, and now every agent, ends up with its own version of the same button.
Treat agents as contributors with narrower permissions than people. Write down what an agent may generate, what it must reuse and the anti-patterns it must never produce, in a machine-readable form the agent reads. Enforce them with checks that run before merge, such as linting for off-system tokens and visual comparison, and require a named person to approve anything new entering the system.
Badly designed governance does, usually because every change waits on a meeting. Good governance speeds teams up by deciding most questions in advance: reuse is automatic, common additions follow a documented path, and only genuinely new patterns reach a human reviewer. When the rules are enforced by checks in the repository, most contributions never need a conversation at all.
Your team does. Aero installs the rules, checks and decision log inside your repository and trains the people who will own them, so the governance keeps working without Aero in the room. The goal is a system your team runs and improves, not a document that describes one. Some teams keep Aero on a light retainer to review contested changes.
Book a 15-minute call. We will tell you which one governance rule would stop the most drift in your codebase.
