taste-skill: give your coding agent an actual art director

Most AI-generated UIs look like they were designed by a committee that agreed on nothing except "use Tailwind and add a hero section." taste-skill is a Claude Code Agent Skill that intervenes before the first line of markup gets written.

What it is

Before building anything, taste-skill deals three of 20 researched art directions and forces the agent to choose one — think "brutalist archive photo collage" or "warm minimal editorial," not "blue primary button, max-w-7xl." It then sources real public-domain images from Wikimedia Commons, Openverse, and the Met (with on-page credits), builds the page, and runs inspect.mjs against a headless browser at mobile, tablet, and desktop widths to catch and fix the top layout problems in up to three rounds.

The full pipeline is six steps: read the brief → pick a direction → find a central concept → build with real media → browser-check at three widths → patch. That last step is the meaningful one. Most skills hand Claude a ruleset and call it done; this one closes the loop and actually verifies the output against the live page.

When it shines

If you are building a landing page, portfolio, or marketing site and the default Claude output keeps producing "component library on auto-pilot," taste-skill is the corrective. A v2.1 app mode handles dashboards and admin views with a separate set of checks. The related taste-skill-classics repo holds spun-out variants like minimalist-ui and high-end-visual-design — they were separated to keep the main skill focused.

The real caveat

A full build takes 30–45 minutes. This is not a one-shot prototyping tool, and the token cost reflects that. The skill requires Node 22+ and a local Chrome, Edge, or Chromium install to run browser checks — on a CI machine or locked-down environment, the screenshot verification step will silently degrade. The image-sourcing step also needs outbound network access; without it you get the design direction but no photography.

The art direction is also random per session. If you are building multiple pages for a single product, you will need to note the chosen direction and pass it back in on each run, or your pages will drift into different aesthetics.

Install

# via npx (requires Node 22+)
npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend"

# or from inside Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/taste-skill
/plugin install taste-skill@taste-skill

Built by Leonxlnx. Source, examples, and MIT license at github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill. The examples/v2/ folder in the repo shows a coffee storefront and a music-night archive page when the skill finishes — worth checking before you decide if the 30-minute build time is right for your project.