Why Do Coding Agents All Design Alike? — Research and Decisions Behind Choosing a Design Stack#

2026-07-03

Ask a coding agent like Claude Code to design a web service and you get a reasonably decent result. Yet something feels off. The designs look vaguely familiar, similar to one another, and slightly unpolished in the details. While producing design drafts for an ongoing project, I went looking for ways to fix this, surveyed the available skills, MCP servers, and harness guidelines one by one, and settled on a final design stack. This essay documents that research and the decisions behind it.