Design systems are going agent-readable

Google Stitch introduced DESIGN.md — a plain-text design system document that agents read to generate consistent UI. No Figma plugins, no design token APIs. Just a markdown file with nine sections: visual theme, color palette with hex values, typography rules, component styling including states, layout principles, depth and elevation, do's and don'ts, responsive behavior, and an agent prompt guide.

awesome-design-md took this further — 74 DESIGN.md files extracted from real companies as of July 22, 2026. Claude, Stripe, Vercel, Linear, Figma, Airbnb, Spotify, Tesla. Drop one into your project and the agent gets a structured reference for that design system.

The insight: agents are already generating UI. The problem was never capability — it was consistency. A DESIGN.md file gives the agent the same reference a human designer would use, in the format it processes best. Markdown over Figma, at least for the agent.

Browse the collection at getdesign.md.

Stitch just open-sourced the DESIGN.md specification itself — Apache 2.0, formal schema, CLI with a linter, differ, and exporter. Any tool can implement it now, not just Stitch.

The additions that matter: semantic color intent, so agents know what a color is for rather than just its hex value. And built-in WCAG validation — the linter catches contrast failures at lint time, before anything ships. Separate export invocations can generate Tailwind v3 JSON, Tailwind v4 CSS, or W3C DTCG JSON, so one source file can feed your CSS, build system, and agent.

Spec at google-labs-code/design.md.