Agent skill · design visual · sickn33
deterministic-design
Measure rendered UI layout with reproducible spatial metrics and a separately assessed usability review; distinguish measurements from subjective judgments and user tests.
Why this skill is useful
Adds a structured approach to UI layout and usability audits with explicit metrics and a separate evaluation process that the AI wouldn't generate on its own.
What it needs
Requires antigravity, claude-code, codex-cli, cursor, gemini-cli installed locally. About 2k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-07. 44,571 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
When to Use Use to catch AI-generated UI that "looks off", is misaligned or centered-mush, or fails usability — when you need reproducible spatial measurements and an evidence-based usability review. Metrics do not prove user success, accessibility or overall design quality. Compose it with any taste/token design skill before reporting design "done". Source: connerkward/deterministic-design-skill (MIT). deterministic-design Thesis: determinism beats AI randomness. A model can't trust its own eye on layout — so don't. Render the UI and measure it. Two sub-skills (load as needed): design-spatial — deterministic layout audit: explicit grid 8-pt spacing, and layout-audit.js computes centroid / optical-center / pixel-oracle balance and draws an annotated screenshot. Numbers, not vibes. Plus a render-then- critique vision loop. design-ux — usability audit: scores the rendered UI against Nielsen's 10 + interaction heuristics via an authorized separate judge or clearly disclosed self-review → prioritized fix list. This improves existing design skills (including the default Anthropic one) by adding the layer they lack — it doesn't just advise on taste, it renders, measures, and judges the output. Composable with any design skill. In central this lives as a subdir of ckw-design; it publishes separately as deterministic-design-skill (its own distribution) via publish-skill. One of the two flagship narratives — the determinism one; its sibling is human-in-the-loop (lookdev). Example User request: Review this interface with @deterministic-design, identify the highest-impact design problems, and propose an implementation-ready improvement. Limitations Layout metrics and vision-judged audits catch many spatial and usability failures, but they are not a substitute for product judgment or user testing. The workflow requires a rendered UI or screenshot; record viewport, scale, fonts, capture state and measurement definitions. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills sickn33/deterministic-design