Claude Code skills for the work that keeps a design system alive.

Audit. Govern. Document. Validate. Communicate.
One skill pack, end to end.

Requires Claude Code. Works with any stack.

The work nobody built AI for

The work nobody built AI for

There are great AI tools for the designer who uses a design system. Generate a component, write a story, suggest a layout. That work is well-served.

But what about the team running it?

The token audits. The deprecation plans. The stakeholder briefs, the contribution workflows, the drift you fight quietly before it becomes someone else’s emergency. The governance documentation nobody reads until something breaks. The onboarding that happens informally because there’s no time to do it properly. The budget defence you prepare at 11pm before a quarterly review.

That work is hard, it’s largely invisible, and it compounds badly when it doesn’t get done. It also never had proper AI tooling – until now.

Design System Ops is built specifically for practitioners. Not designers who use a system. The people responsible for one.

What it is

What Design System Ops is

Design System Ops is a Claude Code skill pack. It teaches Claude how to do design systems work the way a staff-level practitioner would: with structured processes, expert frameworks, and output calibrated to the actual complexity of what you're dealing with.

When you ask Claude to audit your tokens, it does not give you generic advice. It reads your actual token files, identifies tier leakage, flags naming violations, produces a prioritised finding table with remediation guidance.

That is the difference. Not a smarter prompt. A different kind of output entirely.

The 21 skills

The skills

Triage

Start here.

triage

Scans your system’s size, stack, token maturity, and documentation state. Classifies it into one of four states – new, growing, established, or legacy – and produces a prioritised run plan: which 3–5 skills to run first, which to skip, and which to return to later. The answer to “I just installed this, where do I start?”

Audit

Understand what you actually have.

token-audit

Reads your token files – JSON, SCSS, CSS custom properties, Tailwind config, whatever you’ve got – and produces a structured report: naming violations, missing semantic tiers, wrong-tier references, DTCG alignment gaps, and architectural debt. Not a list of suggestions. A prioritised finding set with severity, location, and recommended fix.

component-audit

Inventories your component library with usage signals, duplication analysis, and coverage gaps. Counts what you have, flags what’s redundant, identifies what’s missing, and scores AI-readiness across the library. Produces a component-by-component assessment, not a summary paragraph.

system-health

Scores your design system across 7 dimensions – tokens, components, documentation, adoption, governance, AI readiness, and platform maturity – calibrated to your system’s maturity level. A Level 2 system isn’t scored against Level 4 expectations.

drift-detection

Finds where consuming teams have diverged from the system and classifies why. Five drift types: intentional divergence, version lag, accidental drift, misunderstanding, and system gap. Each finding includes the team, the component, the divergence, and the classification – so you know whether to fix the system, fix the team, or accept the difference.

naming-audit

Audits naming conventions across components, tokens, and patterns. Checks for consistency, semantic clarity, and convention violations. Catches the kind of naming drift that compounds silently – btn vs button, color-primary vs brand-primary, modal vs dialog – and produces a unified recommendation.

Govern

Run the system as infrastructure.

contribution-workflow

Produces a complete 6-stage contribution process: proposal, design, build, documentation, community review, and release. Includes templates for each stage, capacity calibration based on team size, and clear criteria for what gets accepted vs. what gets sent back. Not a philosophy document. An operational workflow.

deprecation-process

Produces a full deprecation plan: blast radius analysis showing every consuming team and component affected, migration path with code examples, communication timeline, and sunset date recommendation. Tells you who will break, how badly, and what to give them instead.

decision-record

Captures architectural decisions with the context that produced them. Problem statement, options considered, trade-offs evaluated, decision made, and consequences accepted. The kind of record that prevents the next team from re-litigating the same decision in six months because nobody wrote down why.

change-communication

Produces the full communication package for a design system change: release notes, migration guide, and team announcement – all scaled to impact level. A minor token rename gets a changelog entry. A breaking component API change gets a migration guide with before/after code examples and a timeline.

Document

Make the system legible to humans and machines.

ai-component-description

Generates a six-section component description optimised for Figma’s MCP server and LLM consumption. Not a README – a machine-readable specification that tells AI tooling what the component does, when to use it, what props it accepts, and how it composes. Includes diagnostic mode: if the component lacks sufficient metadata to document well, produces a remediation brief instead of thin documentation.

pattern-documentation

Documents recurring UI patterns – not individual components, but the composed behaviours they form. State coverage, accessibility considerations, composition rules, and related patterns. Includes diagnostic mode for patterns that aren’t mature enough to document yet.

token-documentation

Documents token intent, not just token values. Organised by tier – primitive, semantic, component – with theming contracts, usage context, and do/don’t examples. Includes diagnostic mode for token systems that are too incomplete or inconsistent to document meaningfully.

usage-guidelines

Writes component usage documentation: when to use it, when not to, edge cases, and anti-patterns. Anti-patterns derived from actual misuse evidence in the codebase, not hypothetical scenarios. Includes diagnostic mode for components that lack sufficient usage data to produce meaningful guidelines.

Validate

Verify quality before it ships.

design-to-code-check

Compares your design specification against its code implementation across 5 dimensions: visual fidelity, layout structure, responsive behaviour, interaction states, and token usage. Classifies every discrepancy – implementation error, spec gap, system inconsistency, or accepted divergence. Dual scoring separates how well the check ran from how well the code matches the design.

accessibility-per-component

Audits a component across five dimensions: keyboard navigation, screen reader announcement, colour contrast, focus management, and ARIA implementation. Maps each finding to specific WCAG 2.1 AA criteria with severity and remediation. Dual scoring separates how thorough the audit was from how accessible the component actually is.

token-compliance

Scans your codebase for hardcoded values that should be tokens, wrong-tier token references, and inconsistent token application. Every finding includes the file, line, current value, and recommended token. Dual scoring separates how thoroughly the scan ran from how compliant the codebase actually is.

Communicate

Move people and decisions.

adoption-report

Separates coverage from adoption – having the system available is not the same as teams actually using it. Flags at-risk teams, identifies adoption blockers, and tracks trend direction. For first-run reports, includes a baseline establishment protocol: metrics infrastructure audit, tracking recommendations, baseline snapshot, and target setting.

stakeholder-brief

Produces a one-page brief in business language. Takes design system health data – token debt, drift metrics, adoption numbers – and translates it into language leadership understands: risk, cost, velocity impact, and recommended investment. No jargon. No component names. Business consequences.

system-pitch

Builds the investment case for a design system. Cost estimation, ROI framing, efficiency projections, and pre-built responses to the objections you’ll actually hear: “can’t we just use a component library?”, “our teams are too different”, “we tried this before.” Not a slide deck. The argument underneath one.

designer-onboarding

Produces a two-week onboarding guide for a designer joining a team that uses the design system. Essential reading list, quick reference card, first-week tasks, and common mistakes to avoid. Calibrated to the system’s actual complexity – a 6-component system gets a different onboarding than a 60-component system.

Proof

What the output actually looks like

All real outputs from real codebases.

Agents

Workflows that chain skills into end-to-end pipelines.

/component-to-release

Runs a component through the full pre-release validation pipeline: design-to-code alignment, accessibility audit, and token compliance – in sequence, with gates between each stage. If a stage fails critically, the pipeline stops. Produces a consolidated release readiness report with dual scores at every gate.

/full-diagnostic

Comprehensive health sweep chaining 5 audit skills with cross-skill pattern synthesis. Runs token-audit, component-audit, naming-audit, drift-detection, and system-health, then synthesises findings across all five into a unified diagnostic with themes, priorities, and recommended next steps.

/governance-review

Quarterly governance package combining adoption-report, drift-detection, and stakeholder-brief into a single review cycle. Produces both the internal assessment (what’s happening) and the external brief (what leadership needs to know).

/migration

Plans and executes a token migration end-to-end. Chains token-audit and naming-audit to diagnose scope, produces a transformation table for every affected token, generates codemods with test and rollback commands, then builds a four-phase rollout strategy – non-breaking additions, consumer migration, deprecation, removal – with entry criteria, exit criteria, and rollback checkpoints for each phase. Finishes by chaining change-communication to produce the full notification package for every audience. Covers format migrations, naming overhauls, tool upgrades, and composite transformations.

Who this is for

Design System Ops is built for practitioners. The people responsible for a design system, not just the people who use one.

A good fit if you are:

  • A design systems lead or senior design engineer maintaining a production system
  • Someone who needs to produce governance documentation, stakeholder reports, or deprecation plans regularly
  • A team of one managing a system that has more consumers than contributors
  • Someone migrating a token architecture and needs both the plan and the codemods
  • Building AI-native design system infrastructure and need structured context files for agents

Not a good fit if you are:

  • × Looking for a component generator or UI builder
  • × New to design systems and looking for an introduction to the concepts
  • × Working in a team where Claude Code is not part of the toolchain

Not sure?

Is it right for you?

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FAQ

Clone the repo or download the zip from GitHub. Copy the skills/, commands/, and knowledge-notes/ folders into your Claude Code skills directory at ~/.claude/skills/. That is it. Skills are available in every Claude Code session from then on. Full setup options – including git clone, the Claude Code CLI installer, and the one-click plugin file – are in the repo’s install guide.

Yes. All 21 skills work without a Figma connection. Connecting a Figma MCP server unlocks additional capabilities for skills that work with your Figma library, but it is entirely optional.

Any stack Claude Code can read. It has been tested against React, Vue, Twig/Fractal, Emotion, Tailwind, Style Dictionary v4, plain SCSS, and TypeScript token objects.

Yes. Design System Ops ships as a .plugin file that installs directly in the Claude desktop app’s Cowork mode. Download design-system-ops.plugin from the repo’s installable/ folder and open it – the skills, commands, and knowledge notes install automatically. You can also use it in Claude Code on the command line. Same skills, same output, different interface.

Yes. Design System Ops is free and open source under the MIT licence. No paywall, no gated features, no email required. The full repo is on GitHub.

No. Skills activate automatically when you describe a task in natural language. The slash commands are a convenience layer, not a requirement.