Taste Skill Bans AI From Building Websites That Look Like AI

Ask an AI to build a web page and the same tells show up every time: a purple gradient in the background, three identical boxes in a row listing the benefits, a little arrow pointing down at the bottom of the first screen. You look at it and think "an AI made this." Taste Skill was built to end that déjà vu, and the method is simple: instead of asking the AI to make it pretty, it hands over a list of things the AI is forbidden to do.

A skill, here, is just an instruction file you install on the AI that codes for you (like Claude Code, Codex or Cursor). Before touching the design, it reads that file, called SKILL.md, and follows its rules. The project is open source, meaning the code is public and anyone can use and modify it.

Without rules, the AI repeats what it has seen a hundred times

Write "modern and clean" and the AI takes the most common path, which is the template already everywhere. If you've ever thought "nothing is wrong with it, but it has no personality," that is the exact itch Taste Skill turned into written rules.

The ban list is the whole product

The file lists what stays out by default. Out go the classic AI purple gradient, the row of three identical boxes, the "scroll down" arrow, labels floating on top of photos, fake product panels drawn from empty boxes, and even decorative numbers like "00 / INDEX" on site sections. Em dashes and long dashes in any page text are banned too, the one tell many people already associate with AI-written copy.

The skill doesn't teach the AI good taste. It removes the shortcuts that pass for good taste.

On top of the bans, three locks keep the page coherent: one accent color for the whole site, one corner style (all square, all rounded or all pill-shaped), and one theme picked once, light, dark or automatic, with no switching mid-scroll. The first screen gets limits too: a headline of two lines at most, supporting text of up to twenty words, and the main button visible without scrolling.

The AI reads your request before drawing anything

In version 2, the skill makes the AI understand the request before it starts. It looks at what kind of page this is, the mood you described, who the site is for and the references you gave, and writes in one line the design direction it understood. Only then does it build. At the end, it runs a strict checklist: every item has to genuinely pass, and the project's rule is short. No box checked, no delivery.

If the site already exists, the skill tells the AI to audit it first and never silently change addresses, menu names or form fields. It's the kind of care you recognize right away if you've ever watched a redesign break the contact form.

It works across tools, and the file is yours to edit

The skill works in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Gemini CLI, Lovable, v0 and other tools that read this kind of file. ChatGPT users can also copy the contents of SKILL.md and paste it straight into the conversation. For anyone using the coding tools, installation is one terminal command:

npx skills add https://github.com/Leonxlnx/taste-skill --skill "design-taste-frontend"

The repository bundles 13 skills, including softer, minimalist and brutalist styles, plus one built to redesign sites that already exist. To install them all at once:

npx skills add Leonxlnx/taste-skill

Even if you never install anything, the logic works for any request: before typing "make it prettier," list three things the AI can't do. Next time an AI-built site gives you that feeling of having seen it before, the question isn't whether the model is good enough. It's who wrote the rules it was following. When nobody did, you get the purple gradient and the three identical boxes.