Encoding Your Design System

Today, your design system lives in many different places (e.g., visual layouts live in Figma, but the code components are dictated by Storybook) and adherence depends on iteration as the project is handed back and forth between designers and engineers. In Replit, designers and engineers work in the same project simultaneously, and both the visual guidelines and the required code components can be enforced by the system under the hood. The mechanism for this is an agent skill: a persistent set of instructions, stored in the project, that the agent follows automatically on every build.

What a skill contains

A skill is a markdown file stored in the project that can include any combination of the following:

• Component library. Imported as a tar file from Figma, Storybook, or a component playground, so the agent builds using only those components.
• Component usage rules. Guidelines for when to use a checkbox vs. a toggle, when to use a modal vs. inline editing, and which variants are appropriate for which contexts.
• Content and tone guidelines. Sentence case vs. title case, voice and tone rules, and writing standards organized by app type.
• Visual guidelines. Color tokens, spacing rules, typography scales, and layout patterns (e.g., "if the app is a dashboard, the sidebar should follow this structure").
• Brand assets. Logos, fonts, and icon sets.

How it works in practice

Without a skill, the agent makes probabilistic decisions about layout, component selection, and styling, which means giving the same prompt twice may produce different results. With a skill, those decisions become deterministic because the agent follows the encoded rules every time. When someone on your team prompts the agent, the relevant skill loads automatically, so there is no need to reference it manually or re-explain brand guidelines at the start of each session.

You do not need a complete library to start

Teams that are building their design system incrementally can add components and rules as they go. When you add new components and update the skill with their usage rules, the agent picks them up on the next build, so the skill grows alongside your system.

Existing documentation works

If your team already maintains documentation in zeroheight, Storybook, or internal wikis, you can feed that directly into a skill. The agent interprets human-written documentation and follows it, so you do not need to rewrite your guidelines in a special format.

What teams have built

One enterprise team imported their full component library and achieved near-complete design system compliance across every prototype the agent produced. Another team built a live component playground in Replit (equivalent to a Storybook instance) where designers can select components, toggle variants and modes, and copy selections directly to the agent.

Export your component library, gather your usage and content guidelines, and ask your Replit team to create your first design system skill.