Paper · 2026-10-27
Everything is an Operational View
Connecting human-facing interfaces to data and actions that agents can inspect and use.
Author manuscript · AFS-UI
The full title is Everything is an Operational View: UI as a Projection over Context in Agentic Systems. The paper asks how a generated interface can remain connected to the data, actions and interaction history behind it, so people and agents can inspect and work with the same resources.
It proposes AFS-UI, organizing the data and available actions behind an interface in a shared workspace with file-like paths. The paper illustrates this with messages gathered from several communication services: each message card refers to the original message’s address, and clicking a card can request a summary. A person uses the interface; an agent follows the paths to read messages and invoke the summary operation.
The interface presents the parts of that workspace relevant to the task. The paper calls this a projection over context and separates where resources come from, what the interface describes and how a device renders it.
Paper details
| Field | Details |
|---|---|
| Authors | Jieshan Chen, Robert Mao, Xiwei (Sherry) Xu, Xuewu Gu, Yechao Li, Zhenchang Xing |
| Version | Author-provided research manuscript |
| Added to this collection | October 27, 2026 |
| Original language | English |
| Length | 9 pages |
This record provides the manuscript supplied by the authors. The paper presents an architecture and a motivating scenario; its discussion identifies further work on usability, stability and governance. Product availability is documented separately from these research claims.
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The earlier Everything is Context paper introduces the underlying AFS abstraction for context engineering. This paper extends that line of work to interfaces.
For an introduction, visit the AFS-UI topic page. The interface learning path connects projection, addressable interfaces and device capabilities.
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