Every AI-built site looks the same, so I built a skill that locks taste before any code is written

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: