design-rationale SKILL.md skillA
design-rationale from ommakes/skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add ommakes/skills/design-rationale@v1.2.0Pins v1.2.0 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- ommakes/skills
- Path
design-rationale/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 3
- Latest version
- v1.2.0, committed Oct 9, 2026
- First version recorded
- Jun 12, 2026
- Size
- 13,540 bytes
- Repository stars
- 21
- License
- MIT
Help designers articulate the cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and platform standards behind their design decisions. Use this skill when a designer needs to explain why they made a decision in a critique, design review, or stakeholder meeting. Also use when auditing a screen for principle alignment, preparing for pushback, or evaluating whether a decision is truly irreversible. Trigger on phrases like: "how do I explain this decision", "what principle applies here…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Design Rationale A skill for helping designers speak clearly about their decisions using cognitive science, behavioral psychology, and platform standards as the language — not intuition or preference. **Reference files — read these before generating output:** - `data/principles.json` — structured principle corpus across three tiers: cognitive/behavioral, platform standards, and applied patterns. Look up by principle `id` or by `moment` (Tier 3) — don't read the whole corpus for a single-principle request. - `references/examples.md` — real-world precedents organized by moment type (onboarding, navigation, conversion, errors, empty states, offboarding). Stays Markdown — the "don't force it" usage judgment here is load-bearing, not just data. --- ## The Core Job Most designers know what they decided. Fewer can explain why in a way that holds up when someone pushes back. This skill bridges that gap. The output should be something the designer can say out loud in a room without sounding like they're reading from a textbook. That means: - Named principles with the cognitive mechanism explained, not just the label …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add ommakes/skills/design-rationale@sha256:349eb1e461bbad81The line at the top of this page pins the label v1.2.0, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_yykgyrqabrqq365t)
4 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 3 versions of this file, between Jun 12, 2026 and Oct 9, 2026, about one every 59 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| v1.2.0 latest | 2026-10-09 | 2b2ad44 | 13,540 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.1.0 | 2026-07-23 | 8e99c76 | 13,540 B | A | view · diff |
| v1.0.0 | 2026-06-12 | 5bc62dc | 13,169 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (13540 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
ommakes/skills · 21 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-28 · branch main
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_yykgyrqabrqq365t GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=ommakes/skills/design-rationale GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/349eb1e461bbad81a6a7df699fcca7042ec44cf22e1522798a19688a9ca97551
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.