Terms of use

Last updated July 16, 2026

Agentic Surfaces is operated by Daniel Woods (ABN 30 344 805 021), trading as Amoeba Design. Reading the site means accepting these terms and the privacy policy. If you don't accept them, don't use the site. The catalog is free, and there is nothing to buy, subscribe to, or sign up for.

This is not advice

The catalog is a reference work. It describes design patterns for AI agents in public services, traces each one to precedent, and rates how developed the response is. It doesn't tell you what the law requires of you, whether a design you are considering is lawful, or whether an obligation applies to your agency or your product.

Nothing on the site is legal, technical, regulatory, compliance, procurement, or professional advice, and reading it creates no advisory relationship. Patterns are written to be transferable across jurisdictions, which means no card is written from inside the law of the one you are in. Before you act on anything here, get advice from someone qualified in your jurisdiction who knows your facts. Decisions about a real service remain the responsibility of whoever makes them.

Accuracy, and what a maturity rating claims

The catalog is precedent-led and point-in-time. Each card cites the sources it rests on, and those sources are the authority; where a card and its source disagree, trust the source and please report the gap. Cited material moves, gets amended, and gets withdrawn, and a card can be out of date before it is noticed. Patterns are published at different stages of review, and some are marked draft.

A maturity rating of Established, Emerging, or Frontier is a claim about the quality of the evidence behind a response, not a recommendation to adopt it and not a warranty that it works. Established means there is a documented deployment to point to. It does not mean the response is suitable for your service, and no rating on the site should be read as an endorsement of any product, vendor, or agency.

Case studies and named events

Some case studies describe real events, including the Australian Government's income-compliance program known as Robodebt. Those accounts are summaries drawn from the published record cited on each page, such as royal commission reports, regulators' decisions, and peer-reviewed research. They are compressed for the purpose of drawing a design lesson, they are not legal findings, and they do not restate the whole of any inquiry's conclusions. Where a case study characterizes what went wrong, that reading is the library's, and the cited sources are there so you can check it. Read the source before relying on the summary.

The response surfaces are mock-ups

The response surfaces throughout the catalog are illustrations built to show what a pattern would look like as an interface. They are not working software and not real government services. The product they depict does not exist, and no real agency, scheme, official, or person is represented in any of them. The names, reference numbers, dates, amounts, and decisions they display are invented to make an example legible. Nothing in a surface is an operating rule of any real service, and no field in one submits anything anywhere.

Reuse and licensing

The catalog's written content, meaning the pattern cards, territory and case-study prose, the illustrations, and the machine-readable dataset, is published under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International license. You may copy, quote, translate, and build on it, including inside your own organization, provided you credit Agentic Surfaces with a link to the source, don't use it commercially, and release anything you build from it under the same license. Commercial reuse needs written permission, so write to hello@agenticsurfaces.org and ask; the answer is often yes.

Quoted policy text, cited titles, and third-party material stay under whatever terms their own rights holders set, and this site's license does not extend to them.

Links to other sites

Cards link to precedents on sites the operator has no control over. A link is a citation, not an endorsement of the linked body, its product, or its position, and the operator isn't responsible for what those sites contain or do.

Acceptable use

Read the catalog, cite it, and fetch the dataset. Don't use the site for an unlawful purpose, don't interfere with its operation or security, and don't present the catalog's material as your own or imply that the library endorses your work. Automated fetching is fine and the dataset exists for it; crawling hard enough to degrade the site for other readers is not.

No warranty, and limits on liability

The site is provided as it is and as it happens to be available. The operator doesn't warrant that it will be accurate, current, complete, uninterrupted, free of errors, or fit for any purpose you have in mind, and may change, move, or withdraw any part of it without notice.

To the extent the law allows, the operator is not liable for any loss or damage arising from your use of the site or from anything you did or didn't do in reliance on it, including lost profits, lost data, and indirect or consequential loss. Nothing in these terms excludes or limits any right or guarantee under the Australian Consumer Law or any other law that cannot lawfully be excluded; where such a guarantee applies and can be limited, the operator's liability is limited to supplying the material again.

Changes

These terms may change, and the date at the top of the page changes with them. Continuing to use the site after a change means accepting the revised terms.

Governing law

These terms are governed by the laws of the Australian Capital Territory and the Commonwealth of Australia, and the courts of those jurisdictions have jurisdiction over any dispute. If a dispute arises, raise it at hello@agenticsurfaces.org before starting proceedings. If any provision here is unenforceable, it is severed and the rest continues to apply.