design-engineering

design-engineering is a skill for Claude Code from softspark/ai-toolkit. It costs 43 tokens per session (4,093 once invoked), scanned A, original, Apache-2.0.

A set of guidelines for polishing user interfaces, including animations, transitions, hover effects, loading states, and small interaction details. It focuses on how interface states change and feel during use.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when refining web interface components, animation timing, loading feedback, hover states, and other interaction details.
Why use it?
It helps avoid unfinished or inconsistent interface behavior. The rules provide practical checks for motion, visual structure, and common machine-generated design patterns.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: allowed-tools in frontmatter. Also seen: mentions subagents.

Part of the ai-toolkit plugin — 113 skills, 44 agents, 14 hooks 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/softspark/ai-toolkit/design-engineering
Any agent
npx skills add softspark/ai-toolkit --skill design-engineering
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/softspark/ai-toolkit

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install ai-toolkit, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 113 skills, 44 agents, 14 hooks.

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-engineering

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/softspark/ai-toolkit/design-engineering.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/softspark/ai-toolkit/design-engineering)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/softspark/ai-toolkit/design-engineering"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/softspark/ai-toolkit/design-engineering.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 43 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 4,093 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 5.1 $0.00043 $0.04093
Opus 5 $0.00022 $0.02047
Sonnet 5 $0.00009 $0.00819
Haiku 4.5 $0.00004 $0.00409

Measured 3d ago against content hash 0a267a22273e, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-06, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

design-engineering 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 3d 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.

app/skills/design-engineering/SKILL.md · 342 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 342 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Design Engineering Skill

Based on Emil Kowalski's design engineering philosophy — UI polish, component craftsmanship, and the compound value of invisible details.

Core Principles

  • Taste is trainable. Develops through studying exceptional work, reverse-engineering animations, and intentional practice.
  • Invisible details create love. Most UI refinements users never consciously register — but combined they produce something stunning.
  • Beauty differentiates. When functionality is table stakes, aesthetic excellence becomes genuine leverage.

Anti-Slop Visual & Structural Checklist

Defaults that signal machine-generated UI ("AI slop"). Each is a falsifiable rule to uphold:

  • Avoid full-bleed saturated gradient backgrounds (purple-to-pink/blue hero washes) and gradient headlines (background-clip: text). Use solid ink or warm neutral tinting.
  • Avoid emoji as load-bearing decoration (emoji as icons, bullet markers, or section badges). Use a real icon set (Lucide/Phosphor/Heroicons) or typographic hierarchy.
  • Avoid the 3-equal-column card grid with icon-above-heading tiles, nested cards-in-cards, or cards with thick coloured left-edge side stripes.
  • Avoid hand-drawn fake imagery in SVG (synthetic "photos", invented logos, faux screenshots). Use a real asset or an honest labeled placeholder.
  • Avoid fake re-drawn UI chrome (mock browser bars with traffic-light dots, mock IDE title bars, faux phone frames). Let content stand cleanly or use real screenshots in a <figure>.
  • Avoid default-attractor sameness (Hero → 3 features → CTA → footer). Pick intentional macrostructures and vary heading placement, column rhythm, and divider language.
  • Avoid the overused default font stack (Inter/Roboto on system-ui with no pairing). Apply the 2+1 rule (display + body + at most 1 outlier face in <=2 slots).
  • Avoid italic headers: headings and display type are always roman (font-style: normal). Never use single-word italic emphasis inside a headline.

Read the full file on GitHub · 342 lines

Files

What ships with it

2 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. 3d ago First seen · 342 lines · 43 tokens per session scan A 0a267a22273e

Subscribe to this mod's changes

design-engineering is a skill published in the GitHub repository softspark/ai-toolkit (170 stars, last pushed yesterday), licensed Apache-2.0. It adds 43 tokens to every session and 4,093 once invoked, about $0.0002 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 2026-09-03.

Related

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