How to Teach AI Agents Design Taste: Naming the Visual…

Learn how Hassan El Mghari translates visual design cues into AI-driven style gates, enabling LLMs to avoid bad aesthetics and ship polished apps.

Ever notice how some AI‑crafted apps instantly click, while others scream ‘off‑brand’? That gut feeling is the design taste we’ll decode.

⚡ TL;DR: Hassan El Mghari reveals the visual “tells” that betray a vibe‑coded app and shows how to teach LLMs to avoid them.

The Simple Version

Think of design taste like a chef’s palate. Once you can name the flavors, you can tell an AI to skip the bad spices.

How It Actually Works

Spotting the tells

🎯 Think of it this way: It’s like noticing a song’s key signature—once you know it, you can avoid off‑notes.

Common cues include purple gradients, italic headers, all‑caps pills, and too many emojis.

Building a theme library

🎯 Think of it this way: Imagine a wardrobe of outfits you love; you hand the AI a list so it can dress any app in a style you approve.

El Mghari stores screenshots of favorite designs and turns them into “gates” that block unwanted aesthetics.

Technical Deep Dive

He starts projects in Codex or Claude Code, then iterates with a smaller open‑source model before scaling up.

Prompt engineering is trimmed to one or two features per request, and preferences are saved in a file named AGENTS.md.

Two landing pages—one from GLM 5.2 and one from Opus 4.8—were shown to a group; most couldn’t tell which model produced which.

Why This Matters

Good design taste lets AI agents ship apps that feel polished, increasing user trust and adoption.

It also reduces the time spent on manual tweaking, letting developers focus on core functionality.

Companies can scale design consistency across thousands of generated experiences.

Key Takeaways

Name the visual cues that give away a “vibe‑coded” app.
Store admired screenshots as a reference library.
Use simple prompts—one or two features at a time.
Save preferences in a skill file like AGENTS.md.
Iterate with a smaller model before committing to a larger one.
Gate unwanted styles to keep the output on brand.
Design taste is a teachable skill that improves AI‑generated products.

How to Teach AI Agents Design Taste: Naming the Visual Tells That Make Apps Pop