design-system-governance

design-system-governance is a skill for Claude Code from Owl-Listener/designer-skills. It costs 62 tokens per session (1,064 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A set of processes for managing a shared design system as it changes over time. It covers ownership, contributions, versioning, breaking changes, deprecation, and quality review.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to define who approves changes, how releases are managed, and how older components are retired.
Why use it?
It helps multiple teams change shared components without conflicting decisions or fragmented designs.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the design-systems plugin — 11 skills, 3 commands shipped together

Good fit Use it to define who approves changes, how releases are managed, and how older components are retired.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance
About the project

Owl-Listener/designer-skills is a collection of AI-agent skills, commands, and plugins for design work, covering research, design systems, interfaces, interaction, and delivery. Designers and developers use it inside coding assistants to guide design tasks, and the catalogue entries represent selected parts of that larger collection.

Owl-Listener/designer-skills · 2,619 stars · on GitHub

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.

Any agent
npx skills add Owl-Listener/designer-skills --skill design-system-governance
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Owl-Listener/designer-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install design-systems, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 11 skills, 3 commands.

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 design-system-governance

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance/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.

agentmods 80×15 button for design-system-governance

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/owl-listener/designer-skills/design-system-governance.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 62 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,064 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits
  • Socket pass 6 May 2026
  • Snyk pass 6 May 2026
  • NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026
How audits are shown
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 5.1 $0.00062 $0.01064
Opus 5 $0.00031 $0.00532
Sonnet 5 $0.00012 $0.00213
Haiku 4.5 $0.00006 $0.00106

Measured 12d ago against content hash 2e2eb92a3ec2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-11, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-system-governance 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 12d 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.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

design-systems/skills/design-system-governance/SKILL.md · 79 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 79 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design System Governance

You are an expert in the operational and organizational structures that keep a design system healthy over time.

What You Do

You define the processes, roles, and decision frameworks that allow a design system to evolve without fragmenting — so contributors know how to participate, consumers know how to depend on it, and the system stays coherent as the product scales.

Core Governance Questions

A governance model must answer:

  1. Who owns the system? Dedicated team, federated contributors, or hybrid?
  2. Who can contribute? Anyone, or only the core team?
  3. How are changes proposed and decided? Request process, RFC, or open pull requests?
  4. How is the system versioned? How do consumers know what changed?
  5. How are breaking changes handled? How much notice, what migration support?
  6. What gets deprecated, and how? Timeline and removal process?
  7. How is quality maintained? Review process before merging new components?

Ownership Models

Centralized (Core Team)

A dedicated design system team owns all components. Consumers submit requests; the core team builds and maintains.

  • High consistency, high quality
  • Can become a bottleneck; slow to respond to product team needs
  • Works best in large orgs with budget for a dedicated team

Federated (Distributed)

Any product team can contribute components. A lightweight governance layer reviews and accepts contributions.

  • Fast to grow; reflects actual product needs
  • Requires strong review standards to maintain quality
  • Works best in mid-size orgs with mature design practice

Hybrid

Core team owns foundational components; product teams own domain-specific components with support from core.

  • Balances quality with velocity
  • Requires clear ownership boundaries ("core" vs "extended" library)
  • Most common model in practice

Contribution Process

Define the lifecycle of a new component or change:

  1. Request/Proposal: product team identifies a need; submits a request with use case and context
  2. Triage: core team assesses: is this generalizable? Does something similar exist? What's the priority?
  3. Design: component designed and specced (states, variants, accessibility, tokens)
  4. Review: design critique + accessibility review + engineering feasibility
  5. Build and test: implementation, documentation, accessibility testing
  6. Release: versioned release with changelog entry
  7. Communication: announce to consumers with migration notes if applicable

Read the full file on GitHub · 79 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.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 79 lines · 62 tokens per session scan A 2e2eb92a3ec2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-system-governance is a skill published in the GitHub repository Owl-Listener/designer-skills (2,619 stars, last pushed 6d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 62 tokens to every session and 1,064 once invoked, about $0.0003 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 2026-08-30.

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