Everything Evolves, Something Endures: The 1st Workshop on Harness Engineering for Generative UIHarness4GenUI 2026

Generative UI (GenUI) is emerging as a new paradigm in which user interfaces are not statically designed, but dynamically generated by AI models based on intent, context, and interaction. This shift transforms UI from an artefact into a runtime system, fundamentally changing how UI systems are specified, constructed, rendered, and evolved. While advances in large language models and multimodal systems have enabled powerful generative capabilities, the engineering foundations required to build reliable, and maintainable GenUI systems remain underexplored.

Rather than treating Generative UI as purely dynamic, this workshop focuses on identifying the stable core that underpins GenUI systems and the dynamic parts that support flexibility while retaining reliability. To this end, we introduce harness engineering as a central concept, capturing the orchestration layer that governs how context, tools, data, and rendering pipelines are coordinated. Harness engineering provides structure, control, and guarantees over inherently adaptive and non-deterministic components. Building on this, we explore how software engineering principles can offer enduring structures, abstractions, and constraints within highly adaptive and AI-driven UI generation processes, including:

• Defining stable abstractions (e.g., context models, UI schemas, and interaction protocols);
• Establishing contracts and constraints across generation, orchestration, rendering and interaction.
• Separating stable system backbones from adaptive, model-driven components.
• Enabling system evolution while preserving key qualities such as maintainability and consistency.

By framing Generative UI as a software system rather than a design artefact, this workshop brings together researchers and practitioners to explore the software engineering foundations of Generative UI systems. It highlights an end-to-end perspective spanning context engineering, harness engineering, rendering pipelines, protocol design, and human–AI interaction models, aiming to establish principled approaches for building next-generation AI-native interfaces.

Call for Enduring Foundations

Generative UI is reshaping how user interfaces are conceived and constructed, moving from static artefacts to dynamically generated, context-aware systems. This transformation introduces new challenges for software engineering, including how to design, implement, and operate GenUI systems that are reliable and maintainable.

Our Harness4GenUI workshop invites researchers and practitioners to submit original work on the engineering foundations of Generative UI systems. We particularly encourage contributions that treat GenUI as a system pipeline and explore the stable core underlying dynamic UI generation.

Topics of Interest

Topics include, but are not limited to:

• Context engineering for Generative UI (context models, memory systems, retrieval pipelines)
• Harness engineering and infrastructure for GenUI systems (orchestration, runtime environments)
• DevOps/DataOps for UI generation pipelines
• GenUI design systems, UI schemas, and component abstractions
• Rendering pipelines for generative interfaces
• Protocols and contracts for UI generation and interaction
• Agent-based UI design and human–AI interaction
• Usability and deceptive patterns
• Testing, validation, and evaluation of Generative UI systems
• Observability, monitoring, and debugging of GenUI pipelines
• Trustworthiness, safety, and governance in GenUI systems

Submission Guidelines

All papers must be original and must not have been previously published or be under review for any other publication venue. Submissions must follow the formatting and submission guidelines of the main conference: ASE 2026 - Research Papers - ASE 2026

We accept three types of submissions:

• Short papers (up to 4 pages, including references)
• Industry Showcase (up to 2 pages, including references)
• Regular papers (up to 8 pages, including references)

No additional pages are permitted.

The workshop follows a single-blind review process.