inhabited-design

inhabited-design

A Claude Code Agent Skill that turns "build me X for Y" into a polished, target-user-rated web app, page, tool, or asset — where every design choice traces to a deterministic random sample drawn from an enumerated pool, not to model reach.

Each design input — framing, designer voice, inspiration seeds, hard constraint, competitors, typography — is generated through Verbalized Sampling (VS): the model enumerates a candidate pool conditioned on the brief, verbalizes why each candidate fits or fails, filters to the survivors, then draws a sample deterministically via an external Bash gate. The framing sentence is the master conditioning variable, so the resulting variance is coherent rather than noisy. Every pick is logged with its enumerated pool, per-candidate reasoning, and millisecond RNG seed to sampling.md — fully auditable and replayable with random.Random(seed).sample(range(N), K).

Why

Generative design tools collapse toward a trained attractor — the same cream-and-serif, the same safe layout. This skill forces variance to come from a logged, replayable sample instead of the model's default, and makes every borrowed element name the specific sampled input it derived from. The result is output that reads as authored, not generic, and an audit trail that proves it.

How it works

A 14-step pipeline. Step 1 runs in the main conversation; Steps 2–14 run in dispatched subagents that share state only through files. Six inputs are VS-sampled and locked to sampling.md before any persona or design code is written:

VS step	What's sampled
Framing (Steps 2–4)	The framing sentence — the master conditioning variable
Designer (Step 5)	Primary practitioner whose voice the build adopts
Seeds (Step 6)	Two inspiration seeds
Constraint (Step 7)	One or two hard constraints the critic enforces
Competitors (Step 8)	Two competitors plus converge/diverge judgment tables
Typography (Step 10)	Primary typeface, against a banned-canon list

The build then runs through an adversarial critic loop (4-factor rubric: fits framing / fits sampled inputs / fits competitor judgment / fits axis manifestation, plus a slop gate and constraint gate) and an ICP loop (7-factor target-user rubric: Usability, Flare, Personality, Visual Design, Originality, Visual Impressiveness, Wow Factor) until both converge. Photography is filled from stock (Unsplash/Pexels) at the end of every iteration so the reviewer always sees real images in place.

Full depth lives in the protocol files under references/; SKILL.md is the orchestration map.

What you get

The deliverable is a single self-contained index.html (the converged build lands at .inhabited/final/index.html). That file is the design — a high-fidelity, reviewable artifact, not code wired into your application. Putting it into a real product is a separate handoff: re-implement it in your framework, or feed the HTML to a code-integration step.

Everything else the run produces — the seeded sampling.md, the personas, the inspiration bank, downloaded reference images, screenshots, and every iteration — lives under a single .inhabited/ directory at the project root. Add it to your project's .gitignore.

Installation

This repo is both a Claude Code plugin marketplace and the plugin it serves.

Plugin marketplace (recommended — gives you updates)

/plugin marketplace add Shimin-Zhang/inhabited-design
/plugin install inhabited-design@inhabited-design
/reload-plugins

Pull future updates with /plugin marketplace update inhabited-design. Installed as a plugin, the skill is namespaced — invoke it as /inhabited-design:inhabited-design (a manual install uses the bare /inhabited-design); the run-mode keyword is the argument, e.g. /inhabited-design:inhabited-design lite.

If /plugin isn't recognized, Claude Code is out of date — update it (npm i -g @anthropic-ai/claude-code@latest, or brew upgrade claude-code) and retry.

Manual install

Copy just the skill directory into a skills path Claude Code scans:

git clone https://github.com/Shimin-Zhang/inhabited-design.git
cp -r inhabited-design/skills/inhabited-design ~/.claude/skills/   # personal
# or, per-project:
cp -r inhabited-design/skills/inhabited-design <your-project>/.claude/skills/

Then invoke it in a Claude Code session (see triggers below). Run modes (plugin installs prefix the namespace, e.g. /inhabited-design:inhabited-design auto):