I build a lot of side projects with AI coding tools. Mostly Claude Code. A few months ago I noticed something that kept bugging me. Every site I shipped looked the same. Same indigo gradient. Same default font. Same rounded cards with the same soft shadow.
Then I started noticing it on other people's projects too. Demo days, launch posts, screenshots on social media. The indigo gradient is everywhere. It is basically a uniform at this point.
This is not really the AI's fault. When you do not give a model a design direction, it picks the average of the internet. And the average of the internet is a Tailwind starter template with an indigo gradient and Inter. The model is doing exactly what it was trained to do. The problem is that nobody told it what you actually want.
So I built tastemaker. It is a skill for Claude Code, and it also works with Cursor, Windsurf, and Codex. The idea is simple: lock the design system before the AI writes a single line of UI.
Full disclosure before we go further: I built this. I am a solo builder. It is free and open source under the MIT license. I am posting it here because I want honest feedback, not because I have anything to sell you. There is nothing to buy.
Taste first, code second
A skill is just a folder of instructions the AI reads before it starts working. tastemaker forces a design decision step at the beginning, with real constraints, instead of letting the model improvise the look as it goes.
When you start a UI project with it installed, this is what gets locked before any code exists:
- A palette. 5 presets, each matched to a mood. Not random hex codes. Combinations that were picked to work together.
- Fonts. 24 curated Google Font pairings. A display font and a body font that actually belong on the same page.
- Real assets. Illustrator-grade illustrations, recolored to your palette. No gray placeholder boxes. No generic stock photo energy.
- A logo. A constructed geometric mark, plus a full favicon set, so the tab icon is not the framework default.
- Motion. GSAP and ScrollTrigger wired in by default, so scroll animation is a starting point, not a TODO you never get to.
The point is not that my taste is better than yours. The point is that any taste, written down and locked, beats no taste at all.
The part where I failed
This is my favorite part of the story, mostly because it is embarrassing.
I picked the 5 palette presets by eye. They looked good to me. I was confident. Then, because I wanted to be thorough, I wrote a small Python script to check every text-on-background combination against WCAG contrast ratios.
The first run failed 2 of my 5 presets.
My eyes said the palettes were fine. The math said real people would struggle to read the text. The math was right. I went back, adjusted the failing colors, and kept running the check until everything passed. All 5 presets that ship today pass that contrast check.
That little story is the whole argument for the project. Taste feels subjective until you write it down and test it. Once it is written down, you can check it, fix it, and reuse it. My eyeballs were wrong 40 percent of the time. A short Python script was right every time.
Install
One command, then restart Claude Code:
git clone https://github.com/codeswithroh/tastemaker ~/.claude/skills/tastemaker
That is the whole setup. No API keys. No config file. No account. Restart, start a UI project, and the design system gets locked before the AI starts guessing.
More details on the site:
Source code:
codeswithroh
/
tastemaker
A Claude Code skill that grounds AI-generated UI in real reference images and a persistent per-developer taste profile, instead of generic AI-slop defaults.
A skill that gives AI real design taste, so the UI it builds does not look AI-generated.
Quick start · Why · Features · Presets · How it works · Contributing
What this is
Tastemaker is a skill for coding agents (Claude Code, Cursor, Windsurf). You install it once and forget it. Whenever you ask your agent to build or style a UI, tastemaker steps in and gives it a real design system to work from, instead of the generic defaults every model reaches for.
It is plain Markdown and small Python scripts. Everything runs on your machine. There is no hosted backend, no account, and no API key.
Why AI UI all looks the same
Ask any model to build a UI and you tend to get the same thing: an indigo to purple gradient, a soft shadow card, a generic…
What I learned
A few things, in order of how much they surprised me.
First, constraints make AI output better, not worse. I expected locking the palette and fonts to feel limiting. It did the opposite. The model stopped spending effort on design indecision and spent it on the actual product. The output got more interesting, not less.
Second, the default look is a choice. Every time you skip the design conversation, you are choosing the average of the training data. That is still a design decision. It is just a boring one you made by accident.
Third, scripts beat eyeballs. I trust my taste. My taste failed 2 out of 5 times on a basic readability check. Now I write the check first and pick the colors second, and I think that order matters more than people realize.
Fourth, design debt starts at line one. Most of us treat design as a cleanup pass at the end of a project. With AI tools, the end never arrives, because there is always one more feature to generate. Deciding first is cheaper than fixing later.
If you try tastemaker, tell me what broke. Feedback is genuinely welcome, in the comments here or as an issue on GitHub. And if it saves you a few hours, a star on the repo helps other people find it.
