Taste Skill

Taste Skill occupies an unusual slot: it is not an app, a subscription or a design tool. It is a set of markdown rule files that live in your repo and get read by whatever coding agent you already pay for. That is the entire product, and it is also why it is cheap and sticky — there is no runtime, no build step and no vendor lock-in beyond the agent you were already using. The v2 rewrite is the substance here. Section 0 brief inference means the agent writes down a one-line design read — page kind, vibe words, audience, references, brand assets — instead of silently defaulting to AI-purple gradients and three centered feature cards. Section 2 then routes that read to an actual design system, which is what separates Taste Skill from the flood of 'design prompt' gists: the rules know when Material is the right answer and when native CSS is. Section 4 adds three locks (color, shape, page theme) that keep a long page visually coherent; Section 5 replaces hand-rolled scroll listeners with canonical GSAP skeletons for sticky-stack, horizontal-pan and scroll-reveal stagger, and bans raw window.addEventListener('scroll') plus rAF loops that touch React state. Section 9 is where the personality lives, and where you will either nod or argue: a complete em-dash ban in copy, section-numbering eyebrows banned, version labels in heroes banned, photo-credit captions and decorative status dots banned, div-based fake product UI banned, border-t plus border-b on every row of a long list banned. Section 14 is the enforcement teeth — a pre-flight checklist where every box has to honestly pass before the agent ships. If you have a deliberate reason to number your sections or put a version string in the hero, this will fight you, and there is no per-rule escape hatch documented. The second real caveat is churn. The default install pulls v2 experimental, section numbering and rule wording may change before v2.0.0, and refinements can land in any pre-release — the imagegen-frontend-web composition rules moved twice inside three days in May 2026 with the left-text/right-image hero going from banned to a composition bias. Legacy v1 is preserved at skills/taste-skill-v1 and installed with --skill "design-taste-frontend-v1", which is the right call for a CI-pinned or agency-deliverable workflow. The 13-skill bundle is genuinely broad: output-skill blocks placeholder comments and skipped sections, redesign-skill runs a six-category audit with explicit greenfield/preserve/overhaul modes and a rule that URLs, nav labels and form field names never change silently, gpt-tasteskill raises layout variance and motion direction for GPT and Codex models, brutalist-skill pushes Swiss typography and sharper contrast, and the three imagegen skills produce reference frames — one horizontal image per section — for handoff into Codex, Cursor or Claude Code. It is markdown, not a GUI, it will not replace an art director, and it only helps if your agent reads skill files. Within those bounds