What is carbon-design-guidelines CLAUDE.md?

A set of instructions for using IBM Carbon Design System version 11 to build React user interfaces. It covers the project’s component guidance, source material, and monorepo structure, meaning one repository that contains several related packages.

Use it when adding or changing React screens that use Carbon components, including their layout, properties, styling, accessibility, and references to the Carbon source code.

It gives an agent the project-specific design rules and current component information it needs, reducing reliance on outdated or incomplete API knowledge.

How darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines configures Claude Code

Reuse

Borrowing it

Nothing to install: this file belongs to darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines. Take a copy, put it at the same path in your own repository, and replace the rules that are about this project with yours.

Copy the file

curl -O https://raw.githubusercontent.com/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/main/CLAUDE.md

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines

Made for: Claude Code.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/instructions/darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines/claude-md.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 10,887 This file is loaded in full into every session.

When invoked 10,887 The same file — it is already loaded in full.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.10887	$0.10887
Opus 5.5	$0.04355	$0.04355
Sonnet 5.5	$0.02177	$0.02177
Haiku 4.5	$0.01089	$0.01089

Measured 2mo ago against content hash d26a60fb8028, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

carbon-design-guidelines CLAUDE.md scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

CLAUDE.md · 480 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 480 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Carbon Design Guidelines

An agent-optimized Skill that teaches AI coding agents how to use IBM's Carbon Design System (v11) to write React UIs. The Skill output lives under skills/carbon-design-guidelines/; everything else in this repo is maintainer tooling.

Current design (unified components/ layout)

Earlier iterations split reference (props, tokens) and guide (design judgment) into two top-level trees. That split made cross-reading painful — an agent writing code for Modal had to juggle two files instead of one. The current layout unifies both under a single per-component folder and uses progressive disclosure via a tag protocol:

components/<Name>/index.md — the landing page; mirrors the source MDX outline; teaches decisions + constraints inline for anything that fits in ≤ 5 bullets, defers everything else to tagged regions in sibling files. Includes a ## Props section pointing to @carbon/react source files for prop definitions.
components/<Name>/{formatting,content,variants,modifiers,accessibility}.md — sub-sections wrapped in <PascalCaseTag>...</PascalCaseTag> markers so the agent can Grep a single region.
components/<Name>/images/ — only images actually referenced in the folder.

## When to use / ## When not to use content is relocated OUT of per-component index.md files and UP to the root SKILL.md routing section — the agent needs decision guidance before opening any component folder.

Project structure

skills/carbon-design-guidelines/            # The skill (what agents consume)
  SKILL.md                                  # Passive-context index; routing + file conventions
  components/<Name>/                        # 41 component folders (one per @carbon/react component with website design docs)
    index.md
    formatting.md / content.md / variants.md / modifiers.md / accessibility.md
    images/
  foundations/<name>/                       # 12 foundation docs (grid, color, spacing, typography, themes, motion, icons, pictograms, accessibility, content, carbon-for-ai, decisions)
    index.md (+ sub-files + images/ where needed)
  patterns/<name>/                          # 17 design pattern docs (forms, dialog, notification, loading, empty-states, etc.)
    index.md (+ sub-files + images/ where needed)
  data-visualization/                       # 8 data-viz docs for @carbon/charts-react
    index.md                                # Entry point: installation, chart type selection, chart anatomy
    color-palettes.md / axes-and-labels.md / legends.md / dashboards.md
    spatial-charts.md / flow-charts.md / gantt-charts.md
    images/
  scripts/
    carbon-assets-search.mjs                # Bundled asset CLI (rebuild with `bun run build:assets`)

scripts/                                    # Maintainer dev tooling (not shipped with the skill)
  generate-icons-index.ts                   # vendor/carbon/.../icons.yml → scripts/carbon-icons.json
  generate-pictograms-index.ts              # vendor/carbon/.../pictograms.yml → scripts/carbon-pictograms.json
  generate-versions.ts                      # vendor/carbon/packages/*/package.json → skills/.../references/versions.md
  carbon-assets-search.ts                   # CLI source bundled to skills/.../scripts/carbon-assets-search.mjs
  carbon-icons.json / carbon-pictograms.json # Generated indexes (gitignored)
  review-skill-docs.sh                      # Batched reviewer using `claude -p`

tests/
  carbon-assets-search.test.ts              # Vitest — exit codes + stdout/stderr snapshots
  __snapshots__/

Read the full file on GitHub · 480 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 480 lines · 10,887 tokens per session scan A d26a60fb8028

Subscribe to this mod's changes

carbon-design-guidelines CLAUDE.md is an instructions file published in the GitHub repository darkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines (5 stars, last pushed 5mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 10,887 tokens to every session, about $0.0435 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-31.

Design and UX Frontend React

carbon-design-guidelines CLAUDE.md next to 6 instructions from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
carbon-design-guidelines CLAUDE.mddarkyzhou/carbon-design-guidelines	Instructions file	5	5mo ago	MIT	A	10,887	Claude Code
vscode buildNext.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	9,719	GitHub Copilot
next.js AGENTS.mdvercel/next.js	Instructions file	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	7,461	Codex, OpenCode
langchain AGENTS.mdlangchain-ai/langchain	Instructions file	149k	yesterday	MIT	A	4,680	Codex, OpenCode
vscode oss-third-party-notices.instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	5,516	GitHub Copilot
vscode copilot-instructions.mdmicrosoft/vscode	Instructions file	195k	yesterday	MIT	A	3,093	GitHub Copilot
deepseek-harness AGENTS.mddeepseek-ai/deepseek-harness	Instructions file	274k	2d ago	MIT	A	4,313	Codex, OpenCode

carbon-design-guidelines: Instructions file for Claude Code