Nodus Design System — Evaluator Overview
The interface language for agent operations.
Nodus DS encodes agent behavior as typed primitives — action, provenance, consent, and supervision. Components are renderers of those primitives. When an agent acts, there is a surface for it.
Agent interfaces have a consistency problem. Every team building agent-facing software eventually invents an approval surface, a provenance indicator, and a status display — component by component, with no shared vocabulary, no enforcement layer, and no ceremony that repeats identically. An operator working across surfaces cannot predict what red means, what “pending” means, or which control pauses the agent and which confirms it. The inconsistency compounds.
A design system solves this at the token layer. The semantic color triad in Nodus DS — red for agency, blue for temporal, gold for validation — is enforced at build time: the pre-commit gate rejects raw hex. No component in the registry ships a color value outside the triad. When an operator encounters any Nodus surface, they already know what red means.
The A2UI vocabulary takes this further. Agents emit typed JSON specs; Nodus renders certified surfaces. The same approval card, provenance chain, or reasoning tree renders identically whether it arrives from a planning agent, a compliance review workflow, or a treasury authorization step. The ceremony is the system.
What agent-ops means, precisely
Four things no other design system ships.
SPRINT 27 · IN PROGRESS
Sovereignty components
Structured patterns for human override and agent boundary conditions. The vocabulary for “the agent may not proceed.”
See roadmap →SPRINT 28 · PLANNED
Protocol components
Ceremony gates, audit receipt displays, and action acknowledgment patterns. The UI layer of compliance.
See roadmap →STABLE
Trust & provenance vocabulary
Components that make AI reasoning visible — citation surfaces, confidence markers, source attribution trails.
See patterns →A2UI PROFILE · STABLE
Generative UI with a provenance contract
167 templates that can be emitted by an LLM agent and rendered without hallucinating layout. The spec domain, not just the components.
See A2UI →The honest build/buy question
What it costs to build this yourself.
These are not features. They are depth layers that require institutional knowledge to build and discipline to maintain.
| Layer | Build Cost | Maintain Cost |
|---|---|---|
| Agent identity, trust, provenance, latency states, ceremony gates | 6–12 months for a team that has shipped agent UI before. Zero open-source equivalent covers this ground. | New agent patterns emerge with model capability changes. Requires a practitioner, not just a component author. |
| 180 finance components: FX, treasury, payments, risk, recon | 12–18 months. Most design systems stop at data tables. Finance domains require ontological precision — wrong labeling is a compliance issue. | Regulatory vocabulary changes. Components must track it. This is domain maintenance, not style maintenance. |
| Three-layer token architecture with WCAG AA enforcement | 4–8 weeks to build. Ongoing: if not enforced at the tooling level, teams drift within a quarter. | A pre-commit build gate and a naming taxonomy that the whole team understands. The system provides this. Building it means writing it, teaching it, and watching it. |
| These estimates are for teams who have done this before. Teams who have not have no estimate — they have a discovery process. [AI ESTIMATE — not sourced from client data] | ||
Honest scope
Nodus is not for every team.
Selectivity is capacity, not status. These are genuine disqualifiers — if they apply, another system will serve you better.
NOT FOR ×
Consumer mobile products
Nodus is optimized for desktop-dense interfaces: treasury dashboards, agent supervision, compliance workflows. If your primary surface is a phone screen, the Finance and A2UI layers will not serve you.
NOT FOR ×
Generic SaaS UI
If you are building a standard CRM, project manager, or marketing tool, the semantic color law and agentic vocabulary are overhead, not value. A more general system fits better.
NOT FOR ×
Teams not shipping AI
The system's deepest layers — provenance, sovereignty, ceremony gates — assume your product has autonomous agents. If it does not, these layers are future investment, not present infrastructure.
Not yet published to npm. The install path is by request during private preview. Getting started means getting access first.
Not a Figma kit. The system is code-first. Design files exist as reference documentation. The component registry is the source of truth.
Not a runtime. Nodus DS renders agent state — it does not manage it. The agent framework, orchestration logic, and data layer are yours.
The color law
Three colors. Three meanings. No exceptions.
Red is agency — an agent is acting, or a user is exercising control. Blue is temporal — computation is in flight, inference is running, a clock is ticking. Gold is validation — a threshold has been crossed, a human decision is required, data quality needs attention.
Agency Red
--ds-color-agency
Authority and AI-initiated action. Active states, destructive operations, agent-owned steps.
Temporal Blue
--ds-color-temporal
Processing and time. Loading, in-flight operations, informational states, links.
Validation Gold
--ds-color-validation
Enrichment and quality. Caution states, confirmation moments, threshold conditions.
Living proof
Three templates. Copy, configure, deploy.
These are not screenshots. They are the actual components, rendered from the same registry you would adopt.
AI PATTERNS
Agent Approval Gate
Ceremony gate for high-stakes agent actions. Audit receipt, structured override, provenance trail.
TREASURY
Cash Position Dashboard
Real-time multi-currency positions with agent-initiated sweep recommendations.
AI PATTERNS
Multi-Agent Orchestration
Visual pipeline for coordinating multi-agent workflows with real-time status boards.
DANA.XYZ EARLY ACCESS
When a spot opens, we reach out directly.
Onboarding is capacity-sequenced. We evaluate each team’s use case before extending access. If Nodus fits, you will hear from us — not the other way around.
Request early access →Capacity-sequenced — we reach out when a spot opens.