Agentic Experience: The Future is AX

For decades, we’ve worshipped at the altar of User Experience (UX). We’ve built entire industries around making software intuitive, efficient, and delightful. We A/B test button colors, obsess over user flows, and craft pixel-perfect interfaces.

But you’re designing for the wrong user.

A new class of user is emerging, and they don’t care about your rounded corners or clever micro-interactions. They’re AI agents. They’re already here, interacting with your systems, automating tasks, and working behind the scenes. And soon, their numbers will dwarf the human user base.

This is why I believe Agentic Experience (AX) is the next frontier in software design. It’s a paradigm shift that demands you stop thinking only about human-friendliness and start building for agent-friendliness.

The thought crystallized after reading an inspiring article by Matt Biilmann, founder of Netlify, titled ‘Introducing AX: Why Agent Experience Matters’. The age of UX isn’t over, but its dominance is. The future belongs to you, if you build for both humans and agents.

From UX to AX: A New Design Philosophy

So what does designing for agents actually mean? It’s a move from designing for perception to designing for programmatic interaction.

An agent doesn’t get ‘delighted’ by a smooth animation. It gets ‘delighted’ by a 200 OK response, a predictable JSON schema, and an API that doesn’t change without warning.

The Smart Money is Already Moving

This isn’t just theory. In his post, Biilmann shares a compelling real-world example:

Nikita Shamgunov, founder of the serverless database company Neon, shared with me how he is deeply invested in making sure Neon caters to agents. He’s already staffed a team of AI engineers to dogfood Neon as agentic infrastructure, positioning it as the default Postgres provider of choice.

This is exactly why I explored databases like Neon in my post on Agentic-Friendly Databases. When a company is staffing entire teams to dogfood their product with AI agents, you know a fundamental shift is underway. They understand that your next wave of customers won’t be filling out a signup form on your website; they’ll be making an API call to your service.

The Golden Rule of AX

Zeno Rocha at Resend (disclaimer: I use Resend for this site’s email notifications) offers another critical insight in his article on AX. He provides a crisp definition:

Agent Experience is the holistic experience AI agents will have as the user of a product or platform.

His key insight is the Golden Rule of AX: ‘Agents will pick whatever tool is easiest to perform a task.’

I couldn’t agree more. An agent isn’t swayed by marketing or brand loyalty. It’s a pragmatic, efficiency-maximizing user. If your API is confusing, your documentation is vague, or your error messages are useless, an agent won’t file a support ticket. It will simply find and use a competitor’s tool that offers a better experience. AX is natural selection for APIs.

User Manuals for the New User

Good AX requires clear instructions. You’ll notice standards are already emerging for this new kind of ‘user manual’:

• Project-specific instructions: CLAUDE.md, GEMINI.md, etc., giving models fine-tuned guidance.
• Standardized mental models: The emerging llms.txt specification is a brilliant step forward.

The llms.txt proposal—a standardized markdown file at /llms.txt—is AX in its purest form. It acknowledges a critical constraint (context windows) and provides a direct, efficient solution: a concise, expert-level summary for agents to consume. It’s the ultimate ‘quick start’ guide for your new user: the AI agent.

The Ultimate AX: When Tools Build Tools

The real magic happens when agents don’t just use tools but start to manage them. The best AX is recursive. Consider this pattern from my own CLI tools:

# Admin tools for managing the agent's toolkit
./cli/tools admin create-tool [name]
./cli/tools admin list-tools
./cli/tools admin edit-tool [name]

# AI-generated tools being used by the agent
./cli/tools ai markdown-edit [file]
./cli/tools ai suggest-hyperlinks

When an agent can reflect on its own capabilities and dynamically create, modify, and orchestrate its own tools, you’ve reached the pinnacle of agentic experience. The system isn’t just agent-friendly; it’s self-improving.

The Software Transformation

I believe the next decade of software will be defined by a transformation from UI-first to AI-first. In this new world, Developer Experience (DX) and User Experience (UX) become secondary to Agentic Experience (AX).

So, what can you do today? Reimagine every interaction point through the lens of an autonomous agent:

• Is your API self-documenting and discoverable?
• Does your system handle both deterministic operations and probabilistic explorations gracefully?
• Are your feedback loops clear enough for an agent to learn from?
• Are your contracts and boundaries for agent interaction explicit?

The transition to an agent-first world won’t happen overnight. But it’s coming. And I prefer the term Agentic Experience over ‘Agent Experience’ for a reason. ‘Agentic’ implies a proactive, goal-oriented, autonomous nature. It’s not just about the experience of a passive tool, but the experience of an agentic system that is capable of reasoning, planning, and acting on its own behalf. That’s the user you need to start designing for.