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“We shape our tools and, thereafter, our tools shape us.” John Culkin, 1967
Zypsy's product design skill is a free, MIT-licensed instruction file that teaches Claude Code, Cursor, and any agent that supports skills to make product design decisions the way we do. We're a design and investment firm, and we built it from a decade of shipping product for funded startups and global brands. It's on GitHub, free for anyone to use.
What the skill covers
- Information architecture
- Interaction patterns
- Visual design
- Design systems
- AI-native UX
The skill isn't a style guide. It's an operating system for design decisions.
Why AI-generated UI looks generic
Most AI-generated UI looks like AI-generated UI. Generic, safe, forgettable. That's a tooling problem, not a model problem. The models are capable. They just don't know what good looks like unless you teach them.
It asks four questions before it builds
Give most agents a product brief and they start generating screens. For anything bigger than a component, the skill asks four questions first. Who is the primary user? What one job does the interface do? What's the riskiest moment? What does success feel like to the user? These are the questions we ask on a kickoff call, because the answers change what gets built. Ask it about a single button and it skips them and just answers.
It designs all eight UI states
Ask an agent for a screen and you get one state: the one with data in it. The skill requires eight: empty, loading, partial, populated, error, disabled, read-only, and overflow. Overflow is the stress test: 1,000-row tables, 80-character names, and images that fail to load. Empty is the one that matters most for a new product. It's the first thing a new user sees, so the skill treats it as the start of onboarding and gives it a clear next action.
How to install it
Two commands in Claude Code, a clone in Cursor, or one line for any other agent. Install instructions are in the README. Or read the skill itself.
The skill raises the floor on what agents produce. It won't replace a designer on complex products. If your team needs designers in the loop, not just agents, that's what we do.
