taste-skill is a practical antidote to AI landing-page smell
A small-product view of taste-skill: use design rules to make Codex and Claude Code produce fewer generic AI-looking pages and more product-specific UI.
The easiest way to spot an AI-built website is not broken code. It is the smell: oversized hero, generic gradient, vague cards, too much empty space, no product-specific hierarchy.
taste-skill is useful because it gives small teams a repeatable way to push coding agents away from that default look.
Why this matters for small products
A small product does not need a design masterpiece every time. It does need to avoid looking like a template nobody thought about. If the first screen cannot explain what the product does and where the user should act, prettier shadows will not fix it.
How to use it well
- Ask the agent to audit before changing code.
- Tell it not to touch business logic during visual cleanup.
- Require product-type classification before layout changes.
- Prioritize density for tools and dashboards.
- Check mobile as a first-class layout, not an afterthought.
The product lesson
Design taste is not magic. It is a set of decisions repeated consistently: what to emphasize, what to remove, how much space to use, what state each component needs, and whether the page matches the job it claims to do.
A skill cannot replace a designer, but it can reduce the number of times a founder has to say “less AI landing page, more real product.”