Alex Kehr’s 'Taste' token tool

Alex Kehr has updated Taste with a Figma plugin that pulls design tokens out of design files so coding assistants can follow the same visual rules. (x.com) Taste is Kehr’s tool for collecting interface screenshots, extracting visual patterns, and building what the product calls a “taste profile” for artificial intelligence coding tools. His site says those profiles are meant to guide tools such as Codex and Claude Code. (buildwithtaste.com 1) (buildwithtaste.com 2) Design tokens are the small reusable values behind a design system: colors, type sizes, spacing, corner radius, and similar settings. Figma’s own help center describes variables as a way to represent those tokens across themes and modes inside a file. (help.figma.com 1) (help.figma.com 2) The pitch is straightforward: instead of asking an artificial intelligence tool to imitate a screenshot, hand it the underlying style values that produced the screenshot. That gives code generators a cleaner map of a brand system than a pile of images alone. (x.com) (buildwithtaste.com) That idea fits a broader shift in design tooling toward structured, portable styling data. The Design Tokens Community Group, a World Wide Web Consortium community group, says its standard is meant to let design decisions move across tools at scale without being trapped in one vendor’s format. (w3.org) (designtokens.org) Teams already use token pipelines to move design choices from design software into code. Style Dictionary, one of the best-known open source tools in that workflow, says teams define tokens once and export them to web, iOS, Android, and other platforms. (styledictionary.com) (github.com) Figma users also have established token plugins already. Tokens Studio says its platform automates token workflows across Figma, GitHub, Visual Studio Code, Framer, and other tools, and its Figma plugin repository says it lets users define tokens in JSON and sync them with providers such as GitHub. (tokens.studio) (github.com) Kehr’s version is aimed less at traditional design-system management and more at artificial intelligence handoff. UX Tools, in a roundup published April 13, described Taste as a tool that extracts tokens from Figma files so artificial intelligence coding agents can build in a team’s actual style. (uxtools.co) The open question is whether token extraction becomes a niche helper for designers using code agents or a standard step in shipping interface work. Kehr’s update bets that the fastest way to keep artificial intelligence-generated front ends on-brand is to give the models the brand rules first. (x.com)