I made a design skill that removes things first

Coding agents design by adding. Ask one for a landing page and you get more cards, more badges and more helper text than the page needs. They also go with the first idea they have, which is the same idea they had for the last person who asked. I’ve written about why AI products have terrible UX, and those two habits are a big part of it.

Mies is my fix. It’s a design skill, a folder of instructions that an agent like Claude Code or Codex loads when the task fits, so I don’t have to explain my taste every session. Its first move on any screen is to ask what can go. The name is for Mies van der Rohe, the “less is more” architect.

The first page it made was bad

I wrote the first version with Codex on May 26. To test it, I had Codex use the skill to build the skill’s own landing page in one shot. The result:

If its gonna be the skill then we wasted our time, the page looks like pure pile of dog shit

It had also taken the reference images I’d collected while writing the skill and dropped them on the page. I deleted the whole thing and took the skill to Claude, because “codex just cannot build good design”.

The skill itself was in better shape than the page. It mostly needed review and adjusting.

No examples, on purpose

The obvious way to teach a model taste is to show it good work. I left that out. When Claude reviewed the skill, I said I didn’t want to lead with big examples, because the model “will stick to one thing always”. Put one finished screen in the instructions and that screen is what you get back.

I want the model off its first prediction, what I call the “first obvious token approach”. So before building anything, mies makes the agent name the obvious version of the screen for that category, rule it out, and try a few directions that are structurally different. Then it ships the simplest one the brief earns.

I also want it strict. My notes from the first night say it “should lead the agent pretty hard to obey what needed to be done”, and that “vibe is important for the agent to feel”. So the skill has a character. Mies is the voice that asks “why is this here?” of every element, and deletes whatever can’t answer.

Every piece earns its place

The rule covers the skill’s own files too. My first brief said every piece of it had to deserve its place and come from the references or from my answers, nothing extra.

The working loop comes from Interface Craft. Impeccable and Taste, two other design skills, are in there as checks against generic defaults. There are seven modes, from Frame, where the agent decides what it’s building and rejects the obvious version, to Word, for interface copy. The cleanup mode, Refine, comes down to three words: subtract, tune, prove. Take out what doesn’t earn its place, polish what’s left, then check it with real data, edge cases and a screen reader.

I wanted “autistic precision” in there too: pixel perfect, obsessed with details. I asked Claude which of the two a model reads as stronger, the precision or the obsession. The answer is “its up to how model understands this”.

The site went through the same thing

I held the site to the same rule, and most of what got cut was my own ideas.

The first to go was Mies’s silhouette in 3D, drawn as wireframe ASCII art. I asked for it close to midnight and had the agent delete every trace of it the same night. Then a tooltip that followed the mouse and a slow glare across the frame. I’d asked for both, looked again, and decided the tooltip was excessive. Both went. So did the fade-in on load, which I thought was too simple. Mies is just there when the page opens.

The details that stayed each had to answer why. I wanted small things that earn their place, so the site feels “warm, thoughtful and intentional”, and told the agent to think about where, what and, more important, why. Background removal left a white fringe around Mies, so we made it black. The frame got a very slight shadow and very slightly rounded corners, so it feels like a physical object.

What’s left is a video of Mies, cut out, in a wooden frame. He’s always there and only moves when you hover. Click the frame and a drawer slides out. Below is a shelf with the books mies draws on: the Phaidon book on Mies, John Pawson’s Minimum, Steve Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think, Interface Craft and Impeccable.

The line under the name took a few rounds too. It ended up as “A design-taste skill that removes what an interface doesn’t need, then perfects what’s left.”

It’s public

The repo went public on May 28 at github.com/deeflect/mies, with the site at mies.design. You install it with npx skills add deeflect/mies.

Yesterday skills.sh, the skills directory, listed the repo with 0 skills. The skill sat at the repo root, and the directory looks for it in a skills/<name>/ folder. Moving it to skills/mies/ fixed it.