Does the rendered UI actually use the design system?

SkillMedia

Check that the UI you actually rendered uses the design system, by reading computed styles in the running app against the project's design tokens. Catches hardcoded hex colors, off-palette backgrounds, invisible or unusable controls, and animations that never ran. Use after building or restyling a component, when a design review is wanted, when a UI looks slightly off but nobody can say why, or when a design system exists and nothing checks whether the code follows it.

Available today. Use it from your connected AI after setup.

Connect ahel once, and every AI you use reads what you have installed.

Then ask your AI: use the Does the rendered UI actually use the design system? skill

What this skill tells your AI

The instructions your AI receives, as published by reticlehq/reticle in skills/design-system-compliance/SKILL.md and read by ahel’s review.

Reading the source tells you what the component asks for. It cannot tell you what the browser resolved: a token overridden three layers up, a hardcoded #3b82f6 that happens to look close, a dark-theme scope that never applied. That answer only exists in the running page.

Reticle reads computed styles in the live app and compares them against the project's tokens. Not installed? RETICLE_INSTALL_SOURCE=npx_skill npx @reticlehq/server@latest init, then the install-and-verify skill.

The check

reticle_snapshot({ sessionId, mode: "interactive" })
reticle_inspect({ sessionId, ref })

inspect returns a theme report per element:

FieldWhat it tells you
offThemethe headline. True when a set, opaque color matches no token in the palette: a violation worth fixing
colorTokens / backgroundTokensevery token whose resolved value is this color. Empty means off-palette
colorToken / backgroundTokenthe unambiguous match, or null when several tokens share the color. null here is an abstention, not a violation: read the plural field
tokenCounthow many tokens resolved under the active theme. 0 means the app declares no palette, and offTheme is never asserted: report that rather than a clean bill of health
themeScopethe theme active at capture (e.g. .dark), so two inspects taken minutes apart are comparable at all

Read tokenCount first. Zero tokens means there is nothing to comply with, and every "pass" below it is vacuous.

Beyond color: is the control actually usable?

The same call answers the questions a screenshot cannot:

  • occluded: covered by an overlay. It renders, and no user can click it.
  • box: 0×0 is present-but-invisible, the most common "it's there, I can see it in the DOM" bug.
  • styles.opacity / styles.cursor: the difference between disabled-looking and disabled.
  • source: { file, line }: where to go and fix it.

A design review that only compares colors passes a button nobody can press.

Animations

reticle_animations({ sessionId })

Returns running and recently completed animations with their targets and timing. Two things worth checking after any motion work: an animation you added that never appears here did not run, and one whose duration does not match the token is off-spec. Both look identical in a screenshot.

Report violations as locations, not opinions

For each element that failed, give the file:line from inspect and the specific fact: "background #3b82f6 matches no token; the palette has --color-primary at #2563eb". A design-review comment without a location is a task someone else has to redo.

What this is not

This checks compliance with the tokens the project declares. It is not an opinion about whether the design is good, and it is not an accessibility audit. Contrast ratios, focus order and screen-reader semantics are a different job, and claiming them here would be a false green of exactly the kind this repo exists to prevent.


Everything else, one page at a time: curl https://docs.reticle.sh/llms.txt. Design token check missing something you needed? reticle_feedback with kind: "gap".

Signals

GitHub stars
479
Forks
122
Last commit
Sep 2026
Advanced
Catalog kind
skill
Gateway key
design-system-compliance
Source
github.com/reticlehq/reticle