Ever notice every app A.I. builds looks the same — same purple gradient, same glassy cards, same generic? It's not bad luck: your coding agent has no memory of your design system, so it defaults to the average of every UI it ever saw. Google Labs' DESIGN.md fixes that with one file. This kit is the whole method on five pages.

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Your AI coding agent builds generic, inconsistent UI because it has no persistent memory of YOUR design system — every prompt starts from scratch, so it reaches for the statistical average of every interface it was trained on, and that average is 'generic'. Google Labs open-sourced a fix called DESIGN.md (18k+ GitHub stars): one file you drop in your repo that any agent — Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Copilot, Codex — reads before it writes UI. It has two layers: YAML tokens (the exact values) and markdown prose (the WHY). As Google's spec puts it, the quality of a generated design depends less on the precision of the values than on how clearly the intent is described. This free kit turns the whole thing into something you can apply tonight. STEP 1 — THE COPY-PASTE TEMPLATE: a complete, valid DESIGN.md you drop in your repo root (colors, typography, spacing, rounded, components) with components that REFERENCE tokens via {path.to.token} so nothing drifts — change one token and everything updates. STEP 2 — DON'T HAND-WRITE IT: the exact prompt that makes Claude Code / Cursor / Gemini CLI read your existing front-end code and generate a DESIGN.md for you (YAML tokens first, then the prose sections in canonical order: Overview, Colors, Typography, Layout, Elevation & Depth, Shapes, Components, Do's and Don'ts), plus Google's official companion Skill (extract-design-md from the stitch-skills library) that does it straight from your source, and the screenshot trick for when you don't have a codebase yet. STEP 3 — THE TOKEN CHEATSHEET + COMMAND QUICK-REF: the five token buckets and the one reference rule, the canonical 8-section order, what the linter's 10 rules catch (broken refs, missing primary, WCAG 4.5:1 contrast, orphaned tokens, section order), and the four CLI commands — lint (validate), diff (catch design regressions), export (to Tailwind v3/v4 or W3C tokens), and spec (print the format for your agent). The one-line takeaway: consistency is the entire difference between an app that looks A.I.-generated and one that looks built. (Note: DESIGN.md is in alpha — expect the format to evolve.)

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