deterministic-design

deterministic-design is a skill for Claude Code, Codex from connerkward/ckw-design-skill. It costs 114 tokens per session (412 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A design verification skill that renders a user interface, measures its layout, and runs a separate usability review. It checks visual balance with calculations and usability against Nielsen's ten common interface guidelines.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to audit spacing, alignment, visual balance, and usability, then produce an annotated screenshot and a prioritized list of fixes.
Why use it?
It replaces reliance on visual guesswork with measurements and an independent review of how easy the interface is to use.

Skill for Claude CodeCodex

Part of the ckw-design plugin — 7 skills shipped together

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/deterministic-design
Any agent
npx skills add connerkward/ckw-design-skill --skill deterministic-design
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/connerkward/ckw-design-skill

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Or install ckw-design, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 7 skills.

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.

agentmods badge for deterministic-design

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/deterministic-design.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/deterministic-design)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/deterministic-design"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/connerkward/ckw-design-skill/deterministic-design.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 114 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 412 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. Scan, not verified.
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.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5 $0.00114 $0.00412
Opus 5 $0.00057 $0.00206
Sonnet 5 $0.00023 $0.00082
Haiku 4.5 $0.00011 $0.00041

Measured 4d ago against content hash 0c59bc7084e5, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-08-30, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

deterministic-design 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 4d ago.

The scan reads SKILL.md. This mod also ships 1 executable file (design-spatial/scripts/layout-audit.js), listed below but not scanned — reading those needs a real analyzer, not pattern matching.

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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

deterministic-design/SKILL.md · 27 lines

What it actually says

deterministic-design

Thesis: determinism beats AI randomness. A model can't trust its own eye on layout — so don't. Render the UI and measure it.

Two sub-skills (load as needed):

  • design-spatial — deterministic layout audit: explicit grid
    • 8-pt spacing, and layout-audit.js computes centroid / optical-center / pixel-oracle balance and draws an annotated screenshot. Numbers, not vibes. Plus a render-then- critique vision loop.
  • design-ux — usability audit: scores the rendered UI against Nielsen's 10 + interaction heuristics via a SEPARATE fresh-eyes judge → prioritized fix list.

This improves existing design skills (including the default Anthropic one) by adding the layer they lack — it doesn't just advise on taste, it renders, measures, and judges the output. Composable with any design skill.

In central this lives as a subdir of ckw-design; it publishes separately as deterministic-design-skill (its own distribution) via publish-skill. One of the two flagship narratives — the determinism one; its sibling is human-in-the-loop (lookdev).

Files

What ships with it

3 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

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.

  1. 4d ago First seen · 27 lines · 114 tokens per session scan A 0c59bc7084e5

Subscribe to this mod's changes

deterministic-design is a skill published in the GitHub repository connerkward/ckw-design-skill (6 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 114 tokens to every session and 412 once invoked, about $0.0006 per session on Opus 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.

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