Anti-Default Design

A seeded roll of design constraints, and the lint checks that fire on a page with the default AI look

Overview

A Claude Code skill against the look every AI-built interface shares. The brief fixes the style, a seeded script rolls the structure, and a lint pass checks the result before the work counts as done.

Stack

Bash, the Claude Code skill format, GitHub Actions on Ubuntu and macOS

What I built

A roll script with a deterministic Park-Miller generator: it fires 3 of 6 design constraints (typography, layout, color, density, shape, motion, 7 options each) and draws 3 metaphor words from the system dictionary, with a bundled fallback list. The same seed reproduces the same roll.
A lint script with 10 checks for the default fingerprint: the usual fonts, indigo accents and purple gradients, uniform rounded corners, soft shadow stacks, hover lift, a missing viewport tag and a layout with no responsive path. Every hit must be fixed or justified.
A pinned design direction written into the project with its seed, so re-runs keep it and a re-roll changes the structure while the style survives.
A suite of 35 shell tests (roll determinism, seed reproduction, every lint check against clean and dirty fixtures, threshold edges, usage errors), run in CI on Ubuntu and macOS.

Key decisions

Randomness comes from a script, never from the model. Asked to be different, a model returns the most probable different, so the entropy has to come from outside it.
The roll is a visible command with its seed in the output, so a skipped step shows and any roll can be reproduced.
The brief owns the style and the dice only touch the structure. An earlier version let the roll own both, and a sci-fi spec-sheet look landed on a sushi bar.
Seven versions, each tested against real briefs, and each one documents the loophole that broke the one before it.

See Source Code