ai-agent-ux

name	ai-agent-ux
description	Use when an AI agent or copilot interface needs status, plans, approvals, uncertainty, interruption, or trust controls across web or mobile. Do not use for formatting a single AI answer; route output structure and citations to ai-output-design.
metadata	{"portable":true,"category":"04-web-and-ui-design","compatible_with":["claude-code","codex"]}

AI Agent UX

Acknowledgement: Shared by Peter Bamuhigire, techguypeter.com, [phone].

Use When

• Design agentic UI patterns, approval moments, progress status, uncertainty handling, and explainability surfaces.
• Adapt agent UX for mobile and web workflows without exposing raw JSON or implementation detail.
• Shape user trust, control, recovery, and human handoff in AI agent experiences.

Do Not Use When

• The work is not AI-specific or agentic-AI-specific.
• A narrower retained AI parent skill fits the request better.

Required Inputs

Input	Source	Evidence
User goal, agent powers, and prohibited actions	Product owner and capability policy	Enumerated actions and permission boundary
Agent lifecycle, failure modes, and latency	Engineering contract	State/event list and recovery paths
Human approval and audit requirements	Risk, legal, or operations owner	Approval thresholds and log requirements

• Product, tenant, user, data, risk, and operational context relevant to the AI workflow.
• Target artifact: design, implementation plan, audit, test strategy, UX flow, commercial policy, or runbook.
• Constraints from security, privacy, reliability, billing, support, and compliance stakeholders when relevant.

Workflow

1. Read this SKILL.md first.
2. Load references/routing.md to select the absorbed child reference that matches the task.
3. Load only the selected child reference files needed for the current request.
4. Produce execution-oriented output with assumptions, risks, evidence, and next actions where relevant.

Decision Rules

Condition	Choice	Wrong-choice failure
Action is consequential or irreversible	Preview plus explicit approval	Silent autonomy causes harm and destroys trust
Work is long-running	Persistent progress with pause/cancel	Spinner-only feedback looks stalled and removes control
Confidence is uncertain	Show evidence, limits, and next verification	Invented certainty misleads users

Capability Contract

• Must inspect capability and event contracts; review is read-only unless implementation is requested.
• May prototype or edit in-scope UI, but may not grant the agent new powers, execute consequential actions, or publish without explicit authority.

Degraded Mode

• If powers or approval thresholds are unknown, stop the interaction specification and return the missing-policy questions.
• Without a runnable agent, produce a state/event prototype marked simulated. Recover failed states with retry, edit, cancel, or human escalation and retest the path.

Quality Standards

• Keep routing explicit: name which reference files were used when the work depends on absorbed material.
• Preserve tenant isolation, auditability, cost controls, safety gates, and operational evidence when they matter.
• Prefer concrete contracts, checklists, tables, schemas, runbooks, and decision records over broad summaries.

Anti-Patterns

• Loading every absorbed reference by default.
• Treating AI-specific billing, compliance, safety, or UX concerns as generic SaaS work without checking AI failure modes.
• Hiding retired skill names; old slugs must remain discoverable through references/routing.md.
• Hiding plans or actions behind a personality animation. Correction: expose task, state, evidence, and controls.
• Auto-executing a consequential step after ambiguous consent. Correction: preview scope and require explicit approval.
• Showing an endless spinner with no cancel path. Correction: persist progress, elapsed state, pause, and cancellation.

Outputs

Output	Consumer	Evidence and acceptance
Agent interaction specification	Product and engineering	State, approval, interruption, error, and recovery paths are explicit
Trust/control review	Risk and QA	Consequential actions have preview, consent, audit, and cancellation evidence

• A concrete deliverable matched to the request: architecture, implementation plan, audit, policy, runbook, UX flow, test strategy, or operating model.
• The selected consolidated reference files and any assumptions, risks, evidence requirements, or follow-up actions that affect execution.

References

• doctrine/design-doctrine.md — the anti-slop charter; agent UX must avoid "AI hammer looking for a nail" feature-cramming.
• doctrine/references/ai-slop-taxonomy.md — the product/interface slop tells (AI feature where search was faster; ungrounded output; "AI" badges as decoration) that agent surfaces must not exhibit.
• ai-output-design — sibling skill for the AI output surface (verifiability, grounding, forward-actions) these agent flows render into.
• references/routing.md maps retired child skill slugs to their consolidated reference folders.
• references/generative-ai-ui-ux.md covers generative-AI prompt, streaming, confidence, source, review, recovery, and human-override UI patterns.

Book-derived additions

For agency, cognitive-privacy, memory, refusal, correction, and exit controls, load human agency and cognitive privacy.

Consolidated Child References

• Load references/routing.md to map retired AI child skill slugs to their reference modules.

Examples

• examples/agent-ux-spec-worked.md — a full worked agent-UX spec for a sample copilot ("Ledger"): status surface, approval/confirmation UX, uncertainty + confidence display, interruption/stop, error recovery, and the human-in-the-loop gates that tie them together. Use as a fill-in template.