Taste Skill vs Impeccable vs UI UX Pro Max: which design skill makes AI UI look less generic?

Ask an AI coding agent for a website and you often get the same page: a purple gradient, a pill badge, three identical cards. Design skills are the most popular fix, and the top ones now have over 100,000 GitHub stars each. They work in very different ways, though. This guide compares them from their source code and documentation, as of November 6, 2026, so you can pick the one that fits your project.

Updated November 7, 2026 · 10 min read

The short answer

• Building a new marketing or company website: Taste Skill. It deals an art direction from a curated library and checks the page in a real browser.
• Improving a UI you already have, or an app or dashboard: Impeccable. It has 24 focused commands, a detector you can run in CI, and iOS and Android references.
• Choosing a design system for a product, on any platform: UI UX Pro Max. It searches a database of styles, palettes, and font pairings, including SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, React Native, and Flutter.
• The lightest option: Anthropic’s frontend-design, a single file of instructions.
• Add-ons, not replacements: Emil Kowalski’s skills for motion, and Vercel’s web-design-guidelines for reviewing accessibility and UX details.

Use one taste skill at a time. Their rules disagree (one recommends a style another bans), so stacking two makes results less predictable, not better.

Why AI-made UI looks the same

A model asked for a page with no direction produces the average of the pages it has seen. Each round of fixes then becomes the next default: purple gradients and Inter gave way to a cream background with a serif headline and a terracotta accent, and Anthropic’s frontend-design skill and Impeccable now both flag that combination as a tell too. A good design skill gives the agent a direction before it builds and a way to check the result. For the patterns themselves, see AI UI design tells, and how to avoid them.

At a glance

Star counts and versions are as of November 6, 2026. All four are free and open source: Taste Skill and UI UX Pro Max under MIT, Impeccable and frontend-design under Apache 2.0.

Taste Skill

Taste Skill by Leonxlnx is the best-known “anti-slop” skill (see our Taste Skill tutorial). Version 2.5.0, released on November 4, 2026, is a complete rebuild focused on company and marketing websites.

How it works. It sorts the project by kind of business, then deals a palette, a font pairing, and a hero layout from curated libraries (its rule is “deal, never choose by taste”), keeping a history so pages don’t repeat. It ships real photos with credits, brand icons, and section layouts, and a script checks the page in headless Chrome at four widths against more than 100 rules.

• Good at: distinctive first drafts of websites, with real assets and a browser check.
• Watch out for: it is large (about 36 MB) and loads roughly 140 KB of instructions before the first page. Version 2.5 dropped the app-screen pipeline from 2.1, and it bans some choices outright, such as violet. The project website still describes version 2.1.

# Codex
codex plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/taste-skill
codex plugin add taste-skill@taste-skill

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add Leonxlnx/taste-skill
/plugin install taste-skill@taste-skill

The older style skills (soft, minimalist, brutalist, gpt-taste) moved to Leonxlnx/taste-skill-classics.

Impeccable

Impeccable by Paul Bakaus started from Anthropic’s frontend-design skill and grew into a full toolkit (see our Impeccable tutorial).

How it works. Instead of one long run, it gives the agent a design vocabulary of 24 commands, such as bolder, quieter, typeset, layout, critique, audit, polish, and adapt, that you apply to one screen or component at a time. Its detector checks 62 rules (31 for AI slop, 31 for quality) without calling a model, and runs from the command line or in CI: npx impeccable detect src/.

• Good at: improving an existing UI step by step; apps and dashboards as well as websites; native iOS and Android guidance; a measurable checklist.
• Watch out for: more moving parts, including an .impeccable/ folder, an editor hook, and a downloaded engine. Read its README notes on hooks and live mode before you enable them, because both can act without asking you first.

npx impeccable install
# then, in Codex:   $impeccable init
# in Claude Code:   /impeccable init

In Codex, approve the project hook in /hooks after installing.

UI UX Pro Max

UI UX Pro Max by nextlevelbuilder is the most-starred of the three, and the most different (see our UI UX Pro Max tutorial).

How it works. It is a searchable database rather than a set of rules: 80 styles, 192 product types, 192 palettes, 74 font pairings, and guidelines for 22 stacks. Describe your product and it returns a pattern, style, palette, fonts, the anti-patterns to avoid for your industry, and a pre-delivery checklist, and can save the result as a design system file.

• Good at: picking a coherent design system quickly; the widest platform coverage, from web to SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, React Native, Flutter, and desktop; low context cost, because the agent queries data instead of loading it.
• Watch out for: there is no visual check of the result, and it treats some looks other skills ban, such as glassmorphism, as ordinary styles. Results depend on how you describe the product.

npm install -g ui-ux-pro-max-cli
uipro init --ai codex    # or: uipro init --ai claude

Anthropic frontend-design

Anthropic’s frontend-design skill is one file of about 1,500 words. It asks the agent to ground the design in the subject, plan colors and type before coding, compare the plan with “the generic default you would produce for any similar page,” and critique its own screenshots. It names five clusters of AI defaults to avoid, from the cream, serif, and terracotta look to the generic SaaS card kit.

• Good at: a small, official starting point that never overrides your brief.
• Watch out for: no tools or checks; it relies on the model’s judgment, and it says little about mobile apps.

# Claude Code
/plugin install frontend-design@claude-plugins-official

# Codex and other agents
npx skills add https://github.com/anthropics/skills --skill frontend-design

Add-ons worth knowing

• Emil Kowalski’s skills (npx skills@latest add emilkowalski/skills): 17 skills mostly about motion and polish, such as easing, springs, and when not to animate. They don’t set colors, fonts, or layout, so pair them with a taste skill.
• Vercel’s web-design-guidelines (npx skills add vercel-labs/agent-skills): a review skill that checks more than 100 rules for accessibility, focus, forms, and typography, and reports issues by file and line. It fetches its rules from GitHub when it runs.
• ibelick’s baseline-ui (npx skills add ibelick/ui-skills): a short list of must and never rules for Tailwind and React projects.

pretty-ui (ours)

pretty-ui is the skill we built at Codex Design, so read this with that in mind. It turns the advice below into one guided run: the agent builds three real directions for your own screen with your content, opens them side by side, saves the one you pick as a DESIGN.md, applies it pass by pass, and runs a checker for AI tells (violet gradients, gradient text, glassmorphism, emoji icons, filler copy, off-grid spacing, and more).

• Good at: letting you choose the style instead of the agent, keeping an existing brand, and staying consistent across later screens. It covers web apps and mobile apps (React Native, SwiftUI, Compose, Flutter) as well as websites, and ships the 24 systems from our design system library.
• Watch out for: it is new (released November 7, 2026) and has no track record yet. The checker is a set of simple rules, not a visual review.

# Codex
codex plugin marketplace add ummydev/pretty-ui
codex plugin add pretty-ui@pretty-ui

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add ummydev/pretty-ui
/plugin install pretty-ui@pretty-ui

# Other agents
npx skills add ummydev/pretty-ui

It is free and open source under MIT.

The tells they agree on

A dash means the skill’s current instructions don’t address the pattern directly.

The lists move. Inter, Fraunces, Geist, and Plus Jakarta Sans are all on Impeccable’s overused-fonts list, and older versions of Taste Skill recommended some of them. Treat any list as a check, not as taste.

Get better results with or without a skill

1. Give a direction before the agent builds. A design system with named colors, fonts, radius, and spacing beats “make it modern.” Pick one from our design system library or write your own DESIGN.md.
2. Ask for three directions, not one. Generic results come from accepting the first draft. Compare a few directions side by side and choose. pretty-ui does this for you and opens them side by side.
3. Review with a checklist. Run a detector, or go through the AI UI design tells yourself, and fix the top three issues before polishing.

Frequently asked questions

Which is better, Taste Skill or Impeccable?

For a new marketing website, Taste Skill gives a stronger first draft with real assets. For an existing UI, an app, or a dashboard, Impeccable is the better fit: it works one command at a time and covers native mobile.

Do these skills work in Codex?

Yes. Taste Skill and frontend-design install in Codex as shown above, Impeccable through npx impeccable install and $impeccable init, and UI UX Pro Max with uipro init --ai codex.

Which one is best for mobile apps?

Impeccable has iOS and Android references, and UI UX Pro Max covers SwiftUI, Jetpack Compose, React Native, and Flutter. Taste Skill 2.5 focuses on websites.

Are they free?

Yes. All of them are open source and free; you only pay for the agent’s usage.

Keep reading

• AI UI design tells, and how to avoid themTwelve signs a UI looks AI-made, and prompts that fix each one.
• The best Codex skills for UI designStyle skills, image-first skills, Figma, and how to write your own.