DESIGN.md: Giving Agents Taste in a File
We've got AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md telling agents how a codebase works. Google Labs just shipped the missing one: DESIGN.md, a file that tells an agent what your product should look like.
The format is simple and that's the point. Machine-readable design tokens in YAML, the exact colors, type, spacing, sitting next to human-readable markdown that explains why those choices exist and how to use them. So an agent doesn't just get hex codes, it gets the reasoning, persistent and structured, instead of you re-explaining your brand every single session. There's a CLI with lint, diff and export, and it can spit your tokens out to Tailwind or the W3C design-token standard.
Why this matters more than it looks: taste has been the thing agents are worst at. They'll build you a working feature that looks like a 2009 admin panel, because nothing told them what good looks like for your product. DESIGN.md is an attempt to make visual identity a thing the agent can read and obey, the same way it reads your lint rules.
It's early, alpha 0.3.0, about 17k stars already, and the spec will shift as it matures. But the direction is the real story. The whole toolchain is quietly being rewritten around the assumption that the agent, not the human, is the one reading the files. First the code, then the deploy, now the design system. https://github.com/google-labs-code/design.md
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The format is simple and that's the point. Machine-readable design tokens in YAML, the exact colors, type, spacing, sitting next to human-readable markdown that explains why those choices exist and how to use them. So an agent doesn't just get hex codes, it gets the reasoning, persistent and structured, instead of you re-explaining your brand every single session. There's a CLI with lint, diff and export, and it can spit your tokens out to Tailwind or the W3C design-token standard.
Why this matters more than it looks: taste has been the thing agents are worst at. They'll build you a working feature that looks like a 2009 admin panel, because nothing told them what good looks like for your product. DESIGN.md is an attempt to make visual identity a thing the agent can read and obey, the same way it reads your lint rules.
It's early, alpha 0.3.0, about 17k stars already, and the spec will shift as it matures. But the direction is the real story. The whole toolchain is quietly being rewritten around the assumption that the agent, not the human, is the one reading the files. First the code, then the deploy, now the design system. https://github.com/google-labs-code/design.md
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