UI Craft

UI Craft gives AI coding agents design taste: it detects generic patterns, scores every interface, and loops until it passes. Works in Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini and OpenCode.

Published on July 3, 2026

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UI Craft

UI Craft gives AI coding agents something they lack: design taste. Agents write code fast, but they don't know what looks good. The result is those recognizably "AI-made" interfaces — purple gradients, bounce animations, ALL CAPS everywhere. UI Craft attacks that problem before the code is even written.

You install it as a skill (or CLI) in your agent, and it works across five harnesses: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini and OpenCode.

The problem it solves

You ask an agent for a dashboard and get back something that "works" but that no designer would ship. It's not a templates problem: the agent is missing the craft knowledge that separates a considered interface from a generic one. UI Craft encodes that knowledge and applies it systematically.

How it works

UI Craft relies on three layers that work together:

  1. Anti-slop detector: checks every interface against 33 rules — gradient glows, bounce easing, transition: all, filler ALL CAPS — and flags them before they ship.
  2. Scored quality gate: an MCP gate scores every surface 0–100 across anti-slop, tokens and accessibility. Below the bar, it blocks.
  3. Convergence loop: /finalize --converge doesn't just report — it fixes and re-runs until the gate is green.

What's inside

  • 31 design domains across five clusters: visual layer, behavior, surfaces (dashboards, forms, AI chat, data viz), critique, and a "decision spine."
  • 22 slash commands, each a focused pass (/craft, /audit, /polish, /animate, /harden...).
  • 4 MCP gates and 2 review agents (design-reviewer and a11y-auditor).
  • Three dials — CRAFT_LEVEL, MOTION_INTENSITY and VISUAL_DENSITY — that change the agent's behavior per project.

The core test

Every interface is measured against a single question: "Would someone believe AI made this?" If the answer is yes, it starts over. That binary bar is what turns UI Craft into a design quality gate you can even wire into your CI.

Results

  • A deterministic design score you can use to fail a CI build.
  • Compatible with 5 agents from a single install.
  • Free and open source, built on the experience of SmoothUI.

Project link: skills.smoothui.dev