Taste Skill for Claude Code: Stop AI-Looking UI

Ask any coding agent to "make a landing page" and you can spot the result from a mile away: centered hero, Inter font, purple gradient, three equal cards in a row, a neon glow somewhere it shouldn't be. Developers call it AI slop — output that is technically fine and instantly forgettable.

The taste-skill pack (Leonxlnx/taste-skill on GitHub) is one of the most-installed answers to this problem. It is a collection of Agent Skills that injects design opinions directly into Claude Code (and Codex, Cursor, and other agents): rules about layout variety, typography, motion, and a long list of banned patterns. This guide covers what it is, how to install it, and — honestly — where it fits next to the alternatives.

What taste-skill actually is

Despite the singular name, taste-skill is a pack of roughly a dozen skills, not one. The headline skill is design-taste-frontend, supported by specialists: a brutalist UI skill, a minimalist UI skill, a high-end visual design skill, a brand-kit generator, image-to-code helpers, and a "full output enforcement" skill that nags the agent into finishing long generations instead of truncating them.

The core idea is simple: most AI-generated UI looks generic because the model defaults to the statistical average of the web. Taste-skill replaces those defaults with strong opinions. It ships with tunable "dials" — for example, how much layout asymmetry you want, how intense the motion should be, how dense the information can get — so you can steer the vibe without writing a design brief from scratch.

The most useful part is the ban list. Taste-skill explicitly forbids the tells that scream "AI made this": the Inter typeface as a default, centered hero sections, three equal-width cards in a row, neon glows, pure black backgrounds, purple-blue gradients, and emoji used as UI icons. Banning the clichés forces the model off the average and into more distinctive territory. That single mechanism does most of the work.

How to install it in Claude Code

The pack is distributed as a Claude Code plugin. In Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/taste-skill
/plugin install taste-skill

On other agents (Codex, Cursor, Copilot), the same repo can be installed with the skills CLI:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill

To install just the main skill instead of the whole pack:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend"

Once installed, you don't need special commands — the skill activates when your request matches its triggers ("make it look premium", "redesign this page", "it looks generic"). You can also override the dials in plain language, e.g. "keep motion subtle" or "go maximalist on the layout".

What it is not

Taste-skill is an opinion pack, not a design system and not a reviewer. It tells the agent what good taste looks like before it generates, but it doesn't audit the result afterwards, and it won't teach the agent interaction design. A few honest limitations:

• It biases toward marketing pages. Landing pages, portfolios, and brand sites are its home turf. For dashboards, data tables, or complex multi-step product UI, its opinions are less useful — sometimes actively wrong.
• Opinions can become a new uniform. Ban enough clichés and the replacements become clichés too. If every taste-skill user gets "artsy asymmetry," that look stops being distinctive.
• It doesn't fix motion. The pack has motion opinions, but making buttons, page transitions, and scroll effects feel genuinely good is a separate craft.

Alternatives worth knowing

Impeccable (skillstackhq.com/en/skills/impeccable) takes the opposite approach: instead of front-loading opinions, it acts as a design director that reviews and polishes. Built by Paul Bakaus (ex-Google Chrome DevTools), it covers UX review, visual hierarchy, typography, color, motion, and accessibility — plus a deterministic detect CLI you can run in CI to catch regressions. Use taste-skill to set the direction, Impeccable to audit the result.

Hallmark (skillstackhq.com/en/skills/hallmark) is closer in spirit to taste-skill: 21 anti-AI-flavor design themes with concrete tokens. If taste-skill's dials feel too abstract, Hallmark's theme-per-project approach gives you named starting points (brutalist, editorial, soft luxury) with real color and type values to copy.

Micro-interaction libraries cover the gap taste-skill leaves: the feel of the thing. Our Micro Interaction UI skill is a pattern library for exactly this — magnetic buttons, spring toggles, toast queues, scroll reveals — each with trigger conditions, timing values, and paste-ready code. Pair it with any taste skill: one decides the look, the other decides the feel.

Which should you pick?

• Starting a landing page from zero and want instant opinions → taste-skill.
• Redesigning an existing product and need a critical eye → Impeccable.
• Want named themes with real tokens to start from → Hallmark.
• The visuals are fine but everything feels dead → a micro-interaction skill.

Most real projects end up combining two: a taste skill for direction, plus either a reviewer or a motion library for finish. The clichés are the floor, not the ceiling — taste gets you past "looks AI-made," but the last mile to "looks designed" is still review and motion.