DESIGN.md

DESIGN.md is Google Labs Stitch’s agent-friendly markdown file for exporting, importing, and reusing design rules across projects, design tools, and coding tools.

Key points

• Stitch uses DESIGN.md as part of a broader design-system toolkit for giving AI deeper context about a product’s visual rules ^[src-040].
• Users can extract a design system from a URL or use DESIGN.md to export/import design rules into other design and coding tools ^[src-040].
• The purpose is reuse: teams can apply the same design rules to another Stitch project without recreating the system from scratch ^[src-040].
• DESIGN.md is analogous to Claude Design System manifests in that it turns visual design intent into a portable, agent-readable artifact ^[src-040].
• As a markdown file, DESIGN.md fits the broader pattern of using durable instruction/context files to guide AI agents across tools ^[src-040].

Related entities

• Stitch
• Google Labs

Related concepts

• Claude Design System
• Visual Prototyping with AI
• Context Engineering
• Component Catalog Driven UI
• Model Context Protocol (MCP)

Source references

• ^[src-040] Rustin Banks — “Design UI using AI with Stitch from Google Labs” (2026-03-18)