Specialists

Designing an interface

A design specialist that critiques and builds real systems, and refuses the stock AI look.

Code
/design                              stay in design mode for a while
/design critique the settings page   one design job, then back to normal

Bare /design selects design mode and keeps it. Adding a brief runs a single job and returns you to where you were.

What it does

Critique. Point it at a screen and it tells you what's wrong and why — hierarchy, rhythm, contrast, the states nobody drew. It looks at real rendered pixels at desktop and mobile widths, not at your description of the screen.

Systems. Type scale, spacing, colour with contrast that passes, component states — specified concretely enough to implement, in your existing stack rather than a fantasy one.

By default it critiques and specifies. It edits when you ask it to.

It won't give you the default look

The specialist is built to reject stock AI aesthetics: the purple-to-blue gradient, the glow on every card, the sparkle icon, the eight-colour accent palette, the emoji section headers. If you want those, you'll have to ask twice.

That's the same standard these documentation pages are held to.

Working with a reference

Code
/design make the dashboard header feel like @reference.png

It looks at the image and works from it. Screenshots of your own product work too — "this page, but the spacing is wrong" is a legitimate brief.

When bespoke imagery is genuinely warranted it can generate it, gated behind your approval and with provenance preserved. See Generating images.

Design versus prototype

/design decides what it should look like. /prototype builds it. For a new screen, run them in that order.

If it doesn't work

The critique is generic. It hasn't seen the screen. Give it a URL, a screenshot, or the route to run.

It changed files and I only wanted an opinion. Say "critique only". In /permissions plan it can't write at all, which is a firmer way to get the same result.

It ignored the design system. Point at it. A design-spec document or a tokens file in the repo is read; an unstated convention isn't.

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