Design System Ops

Claude Code skills for the work that keeps a design system alive.

designsystemops.com

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The work nobody built AI for

Design systems drift. Tokens go stale. Components fall out of spec. Governance documentation gets written once and never updated. The deprecation plan lives in someone's head. The stakeholder brief gets thrown together the night before quarterly review. There are great AI tools for the designer who uses a design system. But the team running it? That work never had proper tooling – until now.

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What this is

A skill pack for Claude Code and Cowork that teaches Claude how to do design systems work the way a staff-level practitioner would — with structured processes, expert frameworks, and output calibrated to the actual complexity of what you're dealing with.

When you ask Claude to audit your tokens, it doesn't give you generic advice. It reads your actual token files, identifies tier leakage, flags naming violations, and produces a prioritised finding table with remediation guidance and effort ranges you can plan sprints around. If you're moving to DTCG, it can plan that migration too.

That is the difference. Not a smarter prompt. A different kind of output entirely.

Who it's for: Design systems leads, senior design engineers, and anyone responsible for a production design system. The people who run the system, not just the people who use it.

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Installation

Cowork (desktop app — easiest)

1. Download design-system-ops.plugin from the installable/ folder — or from the latest Release
2. Open the Claude desktop app and start a Cowork session
3. Drop the .plugin file into the chat
4. Follow the install prompt — done

Claude Code (terminal)

Clone this repo into your Claude Code skills directory:

git clone https://github.com/murphytrueman/design-system-ops.git ~/.claude/skills/design-system-ops

For project-level installation (instead of global):

git clone https://github.com/murphytrueman/design-system-ops.git your-project/.claude/skills/design-system-ops

Claude Code loads the cloned folder as a plugin. To confirm, run claude plugin list: you should see design-system-ops@skills-dir with status loaded. A project-level install only loads once you trust the project folder; accept Claude Code's trust prompt, then run /reload-plugins.

Verify: Open Claude Code and say "How healthy is my design system?" If Claude responds with a structured, multi-step process — not generic advice — you're set up.

To check the install itself, run bash ~/.claude/skills/design-system-ops/verify-install.sh — it confirms every skill can find its knowledge notes. Only git clone and the .plugin bundle are supported; installers that flatten skills into separate folders (e.g. npx skills install) drop the knowledge notes, and skills will stop and tell you so.

See 1-INSTALL.md for the full guide with entry points by use case.

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What's included

Skills