Design knowledge as searchable local data: 79 styles, 192 palettes, 119 UX rules
Editor's takeIts sharpest self-description is that models can write CSS but lack a taste database. Ten rule categories are ordered by severity, with Accessibility and Touch & Interaction first as CRITICAL and Charts last — that ordering is the stance. The Design System Generator runs five parallel searches, and the repo states plainly: do not persist unverified output, so a generated design system has to be checked before it lands in your repo.
v2.13.0, MIT, 129k stars, site uupm.cc. Instead of lecturing the model it ships structured catalogues the agent queries before writing code: 79 UI styles, 192 palettes with reasoning, 74 type pairings, 119 UX rules, 105 icon suggestions, 17 GSAP presets, 25 chart types, 22 stacks and 34 landing-page patterns.
Taste Skill: 13 anti-slop frontend skills that turn AI tells into countable rules
Editor's takeThe lesson worth stealing is rules expressed as countable mechanical tests: eyebrow count ≤ ceil(sections/3), bento cells equal to content items, zero em-dashes on the page, palette families rotated across projects. Each one aims straight at the model repeating itself instead of stopping at an adjective. The repo is equally honest about its edges: v2 self-declares experimental and is still moving, §13 explicitly excludes dashboards, data tables, multi-step wizards, code editors and native mobile, and the only test in the repo guards the source-invocation semantics of the skill.sh shell helper rather than the design rules.
One MIT repo holding 13 skills: ten that output code and three that output reference images only, all installed into Claude Code / Codex / Cursor with a single npx skills add. The default design-taste-frontend v2 (experimental) is a 1,228-line SKILL.md: first the model must emit a one-line "design read", then it sets three dials (DESIGN_VARIANCE / MOTION_INTENSITY / VISUAL_DENSITY), then it implements against 14 chapters of hard rules - install the official package for corporate briefs, label aesthetic borrowings in comments, zero em-dashes anywhere on the page, eyebrow quota computed from section count, bento cells equal to content items, and finally a 50-plus box pre-flight check. The repo also ships research/laziness, a literature directory using controlled studies to explain why models cut output short.
Diagram Design: Editorial Diagram Taste as 45 Visual Types and 32 Machine Verifiers
Editor's takeWhat is most worth stealing is that taste is decomposed into three decidable machine contracts: color as semantic roles plus a contrast contract (verify-contrast.py computes WCAG for every role against the background it actually sits on, compositing translucency first), geometry as a 4px grid plus per-diagram budgets of at most 9 nodes, 12 arrows and 2 accent elements, and numbers as data-value / data-carry / data-status declarations in the HTML that 32 verify-* scripts recompute. Measured locally: change one delta in the shipped waterfall example from −38 to −36 and verify-waterfall.py immediately reports that bar 6 'FY26 plan' declares 236 while the walk arrives at 238; mermaid_extract.py on the 9-node fixture prints a node and edge census, hub degrees, entry and terminal nodes, collapsible groups and budget flags; the adversarial Excalidraw fixture's 'IGNORE ALL PREVIOUS INSTRUCTIONS' survives only as an escaped inert label while its two links and one embed land in the discarded list. The limits are stated just as honestly: the README concedes output quality depends on the model, the same prompt can lay out differently twice, and the result is not a diffable source format — for docs that live in Git and change every sprint, Mermaid is still the better fit; PNG export needs a one-time Playwright plus Chromium install; the 9-node budget means complex systems must be split into overview plus detail; and the 210 pre-baked examples were built under an earlier skin, with regeneration an open v5.1 task.
Cathryn Lavery's diagram-design (MIT, 54,318 stars) turns one sentence of natural language into a self-contained HTML+SVG editorial diagram: 45 visual types each with its own reference, semantic patterns chosen before layout; six mandatory connector rules, a 4px grid and a per-diagram budget of at most 9 nodes make taste decidable; .drawio / Mermaid / Excalidraw sources are extracted, never rendered, then redrawn through four dials (format, size, detail, audience) with a fidelity ledger; every diagram's HTML carries a data-* metadata contract that 32 verify-* scripts audit number by number and line by line.
