Component Libraries for AI Products: Why Building Accessible Components First Makes AI Development Faster

I built Astral Kit — an accessible component library — not because the world needed another component library. I built it because I was tired of rebuilding the same accessible button, the same accessible modal, and the same accessible dropdown every time I started a new AI product. And when you ship a new product every month, “every time” adds up fast.

Here’s the insight most people miss: accessible components make AI-assisted development dramatically faster. And it’s not for the reason you’d think.

The Real Problem with AI-Generated Components

Ask an AI to generate a dropdown menu and it’ll give you something that works with a mouse. Maybe it handles click-outside-to-close. Maybe it even looks nice. But check the accessibility and you’ll find: no keyboard navigation, no ARIA attributes, no focus management, no screen reader announcements, and no escape-key handling.

Now multiply that across every component in your product. Every modal, toast, select, tooltip, and dialog — all visually functional, all accessibility nightmares. Fixing these retroactively takes longer than building them correctly the first time.

The solution isn’t “prompt the AI to make it accessible.” The solution is to never generate these components at all. Import them from a library where accessibility is baked in.

How This Accelerates AI Development

When my component library handles the hard stuff — keyboard interactions, ARIA state management, focus trapping, screen reader announcements — the AI only needs to handle the easy stuff: composition and business logic.

Instead of “generate a modal with keyboard navigation, focus trap, escape-to-close, ARIA labelledby, and portal rendering,” I say “use the Modal component and put a form inside it.” The AI writes 15 lines of composition code instead of 200 lines of interaction code. It’s faster, more accurate, and the result is accessible by default.

The math is clear: a library of 30 accessible primitives eliminates ~4,000 lines of code per product that the AI would otherwise generate incorrectly. That’s not efficiency — it’s the difference between shipping in days and debugging for weeks.

What’s in the Library

Astral Kit has three tiers:

Primitives: The foundation layer. Button, Input, Select, Checkbox, Radio, Toggle, Textarea. Each handles its own accessibility: proper ARIA roles, keyboard interactions, disabled states, focus indicators. These are the atoms in my Atomic Design system.

Overlays: The tricky layer. Modal, Dialog, Dropdown, Tooltip, Popover, Toast. Each handles focus management, portal rendering, escape-to-close, scroll locking, and outside-click detection. Getting these right from scratch takes days per component. From the library: one import statement.

Layout: The composition layer. Stack, Cluster, Grid, Sidebar, Center. These handle responsive spacing and flexbox/grid patterns. They’re not complex, but they eliminate the repetitive layout code that clutters every component file.

Architecture for AI Consumption

I designed the library specifically for AI-assisted development:

Every component is a single file under 150 lines. The AI can read the entire component in one prompt. It understands the props, the behavior, and the composition pattern without needing to traverse multiple files.

Props are TypeScript-first with JSDoc comments. When the AI auto-completes a component, it sees the type definitions and descriptions inline. No guessing what variant accepts or what onOpenChange does.

Consistent API patterns. Every component follows the same conventions: variant for visual style, size for dimensions, disabled for state, className for overrides. The AI learns the pattern from one component and applies it correctly to all others.

Tailwind-native styling. No CSS-in-JS, no CSS modules, no styled-components. Tailwind classes in the markup. The AI sees styling and structure in the same context, which means it generates correctly styled compositions on the first try.

Real Impact: A Side-by-Side Comparison

Without the library, building a settings page with a form, modal confirmation, and toast notifications:

• Generate form: 10 minutes + accessibility fixes: 45 minutes
• Generate modal: 10 minutes + focus management fixes: 60 minutes
• Generate toast: 10 minutes + ARIA live region fixes: 30 minutes
• Integration and testing: 60 minutes
• Total: ~3.5 hours, questionable accessibility

With the library:

• Compose form using Input, Select, Button: 5 minutes
• Add Modal component for confirmation: 3 minutes
• Add Toast component for notifications: 2 minutes
• Integration and testing: 15 minutes
• Total: ~25 minutes, WCAG AA accessible by default

That’s an 8x speedup. And the accessible version is the faster one, not the slower one.

The Lesson

The fastest way to build with AI isn’t to generate everything from scratch every time. It’s to build a foundation of high-quality, accessible, well-documented components — and then let the AI compose them into products. The AI is great at composition. It’s terrible at accessibility primitives. Play to its strengths.

Build the library once. Ship 10 products from it. Every product is accessible by default. Every product ships faster than the last because the AI is working with better building blocks.