design-artifact-loop

Render-grounded, non-slop UI design artifacts for coding agents.

"Design slop" is what you get when a model has no committed design system — it falls back to the statistical average of web UIs: generic gradient hero, three equal cards, default indigo, Inter everywhere. This plugin fixes that with author-then-conform:

1. Commit a concrete design system before any markup — pick one of ~18 vendored token systems (or author a fresh one) and reference every colour/size via var(--…).
2. Write a single self-contained static HTML artifact — no JS, no external network beyond a declared font CDN.
3. Iterate against real evidence, not self-assessment — the design_review MCP tool re-renders the artifact headlessly (1440×900 + 390×844), runs a deterministic linter (token-trace, no-JS, network lockdown, font denylist, blank/overflow detection), and folds in findings from an independent vision critic that reads the rendered PNG. A disk-backed state machine carries findings forward across rounds and hard-caps the loop at 6 rounds — a clean lint alone never ships; the critic must have reviewed the exact artifact version (enforced via a content-hash review token).

Components

• skills/design-artifact-loop/ — the skill: the loop protocol (SKILL.md), ~18 vendored design systems (DESIGN.md + tokens.css each; Apache-2.0, see design-systems/ATTRIBUTION.md), and good/slop fixture pairs.
• server/ — the design-review MCP server (stdio): linter, renderer, and the round/cap state machine. 100+ tests.

Requirements

• Node.js ≥ 18 — runs the MCP server (a committed self-contained bundle, server/dist/index.mjs; no install step). Bun is only needed for development (tests + rebuilding the bundle).
• Chromium on PATH (or set CHROMIUM_BIN) — used for headless rendering. Egress during render is blocked at the browser layer via --host-resolver-rules (only the declared font CDN resolves), so the artifact under review cannot phone home even if the linter misses a construct.

Snap chromium note (Ubuntu): snap confinement denies chromium access to top-level dot-directories under $HOME (e.g. ~/.cache/...), which surfaces as render-blank findings with 0-byte screenshots. Project-nested paths like ~/myproject/.design-artifact-loop/ work fine; if your loop root must live under a top-level dot-dir, point CHROMIUM_BIN at a non-snap chromium.

Install (Claude Code)

claude plugin marketplace add davekim917/design-artifact-loop
claude plugin install design-artifact-loop@design-artifact-loop

The skill triggers on "design a …", "mock up a …", "make me a UI". Artifacts and review state live under .design-artifact-loop/<id>/ in your working directory (override with DESIGN_ARTIFACT_LOOP_ROOT).

Install (Codex CLI)

The repo is also a native Codex plugin (.codex-plugin/plugin.json declares the skill + MCP server; .agents/plugins/marketplace.json makes the repo its own marketplace):

codex plugin marketplace add davekim917/design-artifact-loop
codex plugin add design-artifact-loop@design-artifact-loop

On Codex versions without the plugin system, ./install-codex.sh wires the same two pieces by hand (skill mirror into ~/.agents/skills/ + codex mcp add).

The loop root resolves against the MCP server's working directory (Codex's launch dir) — same DESIGN_ARTIFACT_LOOP_ROOT override applies.

Development

bun install
bun test server/      # linter, state machine, render classification, corpus integrity
bunx tsc --noEmit     # typecheck
bun run build         # rebuild server/dist/index.mjs after editing server/*.ts (commit it)

Design notes

• The linter is advisory; the render sandbox is the boundary. Regex checks give fast feedback and keep the delivered artifact clean, but egress enforcement lives in the chromium invocation's DNS allowlist — so the linter doesn't have to chase every fetch-bearing HTML construct.
• Critic findings can't be faked away. Findings are tied to a content hash of the artifact version the critic actually reviewed; stale findings are dropped, absent critic findings stay open until a fresh critic pass clears them, and a clean artifact cannot ship until the critic has reviewed that exact version.
• State is disk-atomic (write-temp-then-rename under an advisory lock), so overlapping calls on the same run id cannot corrupt the trace.

Extracted from NanoClaw, where it ships as a container skill for Claude/Codex/OpenCode agents.

License

MIT (see LICENSE). The vendored design-system corpus is Apache-2.0 — see skills/design-artifact-loop/design-systems/LICENSE and ATTRIBUTION.md.