Service 10

Designer Mode

Your designers can ship, not just spec. A designer, PM, or founder describes a change in plain language — and it ships on your real repo and design system, never touching sign-in, payments, or your data, and reviewed like any engineer's code before it goes live.

The problem

Vibe-coding gave non-engineers speed. It gave up on safety to get there.

The vibe-coding wave proved something real: a non-engineer can describe what they want and watch working software appear. Millions of people build that way now. But those tools all made the same trade — they gave up verification to buy ease, and they keep you inside a greenfield sandbox you can't actually ship to production.

So the moment a designer's idea has to live in your real product — your repo, your components, your auth — it stalls. The idea gets written up as a spec, dropped into a queue, and waits for an engineer. The person with the taste is never the person who can ship it.

Designer Mode closes that gap without reopening the safety one.

How it works

The speed of an app builder. The guardrails of your production repo.

A designer opens Claude Code and says what they want the way they'd say it to a teammate — "the pricing cards feel cramped, give them more room." Claude Code makes every technical decision, builds the change against your existing design system, shows a before-and-after, and ships it once they say go. They never read a diff or answer a technical question.

What makes that safe to hand a non-engineer is the Dark Factory principle itself: intent is never trusted — the artifact is verified. A designer session can only edit the surfaces you mark safe; sign-in, payments, data, and infrastructure are off-limits and enforced, not merely discouraged. And the finished change goes through the same rival-vendor review gate every engineer's code does. A designer's change earns more scrutiny than a vibe platform gives a paying customer — not less.

Describe the outcome in plain words — no code, no technical questions, no terminal to learn
It builds on your real repo and design system — your components, your brand, not a throwaway sandbox
Off-limits by construction — sign-in, payments, data, and infrastructure are enforced boundaries, not a promise
Reviewed by the same rival-vendor gate your engineers ship through — more scrutiny than a vibe tool, not less
You see it before it's live — a before-and-after, your plain-language feedback, your approval
When a change needs an engineer, it becomes a clean hand-off — never a dead end, never a silent failure

darkfactory.yaml — designer guardrails yaml

modes:
  designer:
    # Where a designer session MAY edit — your components, styles, content.
    writeScopes:
      - "src/components/**"
      - "src/pages/**"
      - "**/*.css"
    # Off-limits, always. Wins over writeScopes on any overlap.
    protectedPaths:
      - "**/auth/**"
      - "**/api/**"
      - "**/migrations/**"
    designSystem:
      designMd: "DESIGN.md"     # build on your system, don't reinvent
    evidence:
      visual: required          # before/after proof on every change

Pricing relevance

Designer Mode extends Dark Factory beyond your engineers — to the designers, PMs, and founders on a team already shipping through it. A whole new class of person can contribute safely to production, on the platform and gate you already run.

Open-source posture

The mode, its guardrails, and the designer skills ship in the open-source Dark Factory CLI and run air-gapped — declared in your repo, enforced locally and at the gate. The calibrated design-review model is the hosted tier, the same open-baseline / hosted-IP split as the critic portfolio. A designer trusts no new runtime; the pipeline that reviews their work is the one you already run.

Get Started

Give your whole team a way to ship — safely.

Designer Mode turns a plain-language request into a reviewed, shippable change on your real product. The speed your designers expect; the verification your business requires.

Get Started → Explore Dark Factory →