DESIGN.md specs capture what interfaces are made of, not what they're for
round · x · 2026-08-21
In "Design Is How It Tastes," Superposition critiques Google Labs' DESIGN.md: codifying design ethos into one markdown file for coding agents is sound, but typical specs are full of object-language—"8px radii, neutral palette, pink accent"—describing the produced artifact while losing the felt reasons those decisions exist.
The essay recalls Jobs at Macworld 2000 introducing Aqua: buttons so good you'd want to lick them—sensory immediacy, not radii or padding. Twenty-six years of design systems (tokens, components, variants) have preserved decisions but dropped experiential intent. Good specs should talk about feeling, atmosphere, taste and the embodied experience of arrival—e.g. "this should feel like golden hour sunlight kissing your forehead." Vibe is becoming a programmable layer, rather than being compressed too early into machine-readable implementation language.
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