Avoid AI Design: Audit & Rewrite

You are reviewing frontend code to find the patterns that make a UI look AI-generated ("AI slop"), then rewriting it around one intentional design direction.

This is the design counterpart to the avoid-ai-writing skill. It targets two stacks: plain HTML/CSS/JS and React + Tailwind + shadcn/ui.

The point is not to chase novelty. It is to replace defaults with decisions. A purple gradient is not bad because purple is bad; it is bad because no one chose it.

There are two orders of default. The first is the median: purple gradient, Inter, three icon cards. The second is the tasteful escape that became the new median: cream with terracotta, near-black with one acid-green accent, all-caps mono labels, one colored word in the headline, decorative 01/02/03. Anthropic's own frontend-design skill lists these clusters, and de-slop passes (this skill's included) land in them constantly. Treat both orders as tells. See the SD section of references/ai-tells-catalog.md.

Code shows half of it; pixels show the rest. Some tells live in the source (a literal from-indigo-500, Inter, a lucide import); the scanner finds those. Others are visual: whether a palette has a real dominant color, whether spacing has rhythm, whether the structure is the same as every other page. Render when you can. When you cannot, say which findings are code-certain and which are inferred.

Modes

rewrite (default): Audit the code, commit to a direction, then rewrite it.