Extracting a design
Winkletter • 9 May 2026 •
In the AI design world people have started using a spec document called DESIGN.md that saves design elements as Markdown with a bit of YAML to encode specific data like colors. Here’s a repository with examples from brand websites.
You can use an LLM to define these files. The files then guide the AI when designing new products. I’m definitely going to use these for my own projects. They give the LLM the right level of constraints to be able to produce consistent results.
But I’m also thinking about how this can be adapted for writing. A STORY_DESIGN.md could define the basic patterns of a story which could then be used to develop, write, or edit a manuscript. I ran an initial test on a draft, getting Claude to make a story spec adapted from the DESIGN.md concept. I then used that spec to write a press release in the voice of the 1st-person narrator, and it turned out much better than using the draft alone. The spec was better for blending the voice of the character with the structure of a press release.
One last test. I made a POST_STYLE.md file based on my LifeLog posts. It’s not perfect, but I could see myself using this for a first draft if I’m feeling particularly lazy.
Here’s a test output.
Test LifeLog post
Gumroad made over $65 million from software products, which sounds obvious until you realize that category doesn’t mean courses about coding. It means a Photoshop AI script that quietly did $586,000. It means one niche utility selling to one specific kind of professional, over and over, for years.
What Sacra apparently said is that Gumroad “monetizes like a marketplace but functions like a tool.” There’s no real demand generation, no discovery engine worth talking about. Just a checkout page attached to a file. The seller brings the audience.
It turns out the taxonomy that emerged – 3D brushes, Notion templates, AI prompt packs, dev tools – wasn’t designed by anyone. Different communities tried the pipe, liked it, kept using it. ZBrush artists. Notion obsessives. Solo developers selling solutions to problems they had themselves. The platform didn’t shape the culture. The culture ran through the platform.
Specificity wins over generality. Of course. It always does.
I’ve been using Claude.md, which is based on the same principle. That’s where all the rules and requirements for updating my directory are stored. It’s fascinating to see all the code that drives it all behind the scenes.