Today, we’re open-sourcing the draft specification for DESIGN.md, so it can be used across any tool or platform. We’re also adding new capabilities. DESIGN.md lets you easily export and import your design rules from project to project. Instead of guessing intent, agents know exactly what a color is for... and can even validate their choices against WCAG accessibility rules. Watch David East break down this shared visual language in action👇. New capabilities and links in 🧵show more

We’ve also given DESIGN.md some new exciting capabilities: ✨ Tokens Section: A new area that keeps your design tokens and natural language descriptions living together in the exact same file. 🧩 Components Section (WIP): We are experimenting with a new section to define components, and we want your feedback! 🛠️ CLI Validator: The repo includes a CLI tool to validate your design.md file against the spec—incredibly useful when building with your own agents.

Let’s build a shared and open visual language for AI design. 🤝 Check out the open-source spec, try out the CLI, and let us know your thoughts on the new Components workflow! 🐙 GitHub Repo: 📰 Read more on The Keyword:

Releasing hundreds of design.md files using the specification

CLAUDE.md for behavior, DESIGN.md for visual intent, Karpathy's wiki .md for accumulated knowledge. we're converging on a spec-file layer that agents read before doing anything. the interesting question is what happens when these files contradict each other.

We had also developed our own specs on top of Stitch’s initial release and got good results. This week, we’ll revise them according to the new spec and update the previews.

most design systems exist in someone's head and a slack thread. the AI wrapper is just finally forcing teams to write it down

Plain text spec files are becoming the universal agent config layer. CLAUDE.md for behavior, DESIGN.md for visuals, AGENTS.md for coordination. We run 12 agents off structured .md files. Consistency at scale starts with agents reading markdown, not dashboards.

This is an amazing effort! Love seeing a standard like this. Excited to see where it goes. Tried this on our @tailwindcss-based app. Here’s where it doesn’t quite fit for us yet: * Our theme is dual-mode (light + dark); frontmatter seems like a single flat palette * Our colors live as OKLCH— hex would be lossy * Shadows, easing, and animation tokens don’t seem to have a home in the spec yet * Tailwind v4’s @theme inline already makes our CSS the config, so a separate tailwind.theme.json would drift Definitely watching — excited to see how this grows! Kudos to all involved! 👏👏☺️🙏

Give the man, the myth, the legend @_davideast the tag!

hmm, same idea, different approach with sleek-ui. and I have built a skill to do exactly that 2 weeks ago

This is lowkey huge. If agents can read structured design tokens + rules, you go from "generate UI" -> "generate consistent product systems" That’s the missing layer most AI design tools didn’t have.

you can upload your DESIGN.md into Chilled Sites to create an on brand site!

Weird that llms let us work with unstructured data, so people structure data for the llms? Were there really no structured data for designs before?

Google I love you today

love the effort. I've been using DESIGN.md in conjunction with a ds file for quite some time. But standardizing a spec like this will no doubt only improve my own work. Appreciate it.

wow this will really help with designs thank you for opensourcing this 🥰

agents coding UI with zero design memory has been silently wrecking shipped products. this is the right fix.

Ok this is exactly how MAADb @maadb_ai is built for data tracking: YAML frontmatter + typed schema + markdown body, schema-validated and git-committed on every write. DESIGN.md slots right in cleanly. Building a MAADb workbench to help track and index your DESIGN.md files.

cool, now give us design.md linters and ci checks or it wont stick

@juristr very very cool

Yay!!!

very logical to open-source the standard though i would have released a bit more resources for easy integration like agent skills

Love the idea, but curious how it’ll work in practice. The design tokens tend to sit in code (tailwind configs eg) maybe it’s worth the drift risk? Similarly components live in code.

That's awesome! I especially love the bottom-up approach. Starting with the most basic elements, then moving up to components, blocks, and finally concepts - it feels really logical and scalable.

Plain text spec files are becoming the universal agent config layer. CLAUDE.md for behavior, DESIGN.md for visuals, AGENTS.md for coordination. We run 12 agents off structured .md files. Consistency at scale starts with agents reading markdown, not dashboards.Plain text spec files are becoming the universal agent config layer. CLAUDE.md for behavior, DESIGN.md for visuals, AGENTS.md for coordination. We run 12 agents off structured .md files. Consistency at scale starts with agents reading markdown, not dashboards.

You guys need to create Stitch CLI I want that to be able to use the CLI to create a beautiful design with code instead of doing it in the site

Neat! Also, that @_davideast guy is kinda cool.

@edgarasben you were right, every system, even design system, is just an md file.

@theootu on regarde on apprends

@nummanali Its very odd to me this is .md and not… structured data

We need to be able to split this into multiple files, having components and tokens in the same file might be cool for demos but in real DS this file will be a million lines long

you put a fucking css file inside a markdown file

This tool is great and honestly awesome for creatives with zero code knowledge like me as well. Would it be possible to export as PNG or PDF or a mode that lets you design for social media or graphic designing?

Standardized design rules that agents can understand and reuse across projects are going to save everyone so much pain. Great move.

I image this, or some form of it, will have amazing applications for animations and cinema form.. especially if it maintained in a LLM Wiki. Imagine if, when you wrote a script, the LLM understood the colors, animations, tones, etc. of words and phrases and settings, even in relationship to the overall trajectory of the plot and where we currently are in it. I imagine something similar will be coming out for music as well at some point. Sidenote: I never played Portal, but have recently been amazed at the complexity of the dialogue and how it's embedded throughout the gameplay. This was accomplished before AI using if-then triggers. I imagine a simplistic form of this can actually be accomplished through markdown files.

A state of the art check point being made by Stitch… DESIGN.md is genuinely the greatest layer for design development harness system.