What is taste

taste

Abductive reasoning for any website's design taste

Reads any site's design decisions — not just the tokens, but the reasoning behind them. Run /taste <url> and get a Design Map + Taste DNA your agents can actually use.

Install the skill View on GitHub

Pipeline

Four steps from URL to taste.

Four agents, four roles. Each pass reads the same page through a sharper lens — until what's left is a brief any AI tool can build from.

  1. Extract Measurements
    You are a Senior Design AI. Your job is to extract precise, objective design measurements from a webpage.
  2. Detect Patterns
    You are a Principal Design Engineer detecting SYSTEMATIC RULES in the measurements provided by Step 1.
  3. Infer Taste
    You are the Ultimate Design Critic. You will now derive the "Taste" — the deliberate, painful TRADE-OFFS the designer made.
  4. Observer
    You are the Lead Critic & Final Editor. Your job is to RUTHLESSLY filter the taste analysis from Step 3. Zero bullshit passes through you.
1 Extract
measurements
2 Detect
patterns
Infer taste 3
4 Observe
output

How to reverse engineer design taste

20 measurement categories, every colour, weight, spacing value, radius, and shadow cited with exact px / hex / ratio. No approximations.

5–8 system-level rules extracted. Each pattern gets an Evidence line and a Design Goal explaining why it exists.

4 taste principles — each with Trigger, Decision, Reason, Evidence, and Trade-off. At least one Restraint principle is required.

Quality gate. Runs anti-slop grep, validates JSON, then writes the final output.{domain}.md + {domain}.json

linear.app

A taste principle has evidence and a trade-off.

This is what /taste actually produces — not a vibe, a design argument you can act on.

Restraint
Brand lives in white, not in color
Trigger
Deciding on an accent or brand color.
Decision
Don't introduce one. Use white (#F7F8F8) as the accent against near-black.
Reason
Color-as-brand is a shortcut for products without visual confidence. On a near-black surface, white carries all the emphasis needed — everything else is noise. Adding a purple or blue CTA button would cheapen the effect by making it feel like a template.
Evidence
Every nav link, button, and CTA on the page is white or near-white. The only colored element is a translucent green badge for functional status. The pink gradient in the hero is a single editorial moment, not a system. DOM accentCandidates are 100% grays and whites.
Trade-off
You cannot use color to differentiate feature tiers or calls to action. Linear resolves this with weight and size hierarchy alone — not color weight.

Works with your tools

Your AI agent gets the taste.

/taste writes a rules file formatted for whichever tool you build with — Cursor, Windsurf, Claude Code, and more. The agent reads it automatically.

Cursor
.cursor/rules/{domain}-taste.mdc
Windsurf
.windsurf/rules/{domain}-taste.md
Claude Code
CLAUDE.md (appends Design Taste section)
GitHub Copilot
.github/copilot-instructions.md
Bolt
.bolt/prompt
Antigravity
GEMINI.md
v0 by Vercel
taste-tokens.css + instructions
Figma Make
taste-figma.css + instructions
Lovable
Printed to paste in Project Knowledge

Get started

Three steps. Then run it anywhere.

Works in Claude Code and Gemini CLI.

git clone https://github.com/senlindesign/taste-skill ~/.claude/skills/taste
claude mcp add playwright -s user -- npx -y @playwright/mcp@latest --isolated
/taste https://linear.app
git clone https://github.com/senlindesign/taste-skill ~/.gemini/skills/taste
{ "mcpServers": { "playwright": { "command": "npx", "args": ["-y", "@playwright/mcp@latest", "--isolated"] } } }
/taste https://linear.app