Set up
Try a plugin
The Design plugin ships with /design-system already structured to diff a screen or PR against a token file and component inventory. If your admin manages plugins and it's not available yet, skip this; nothing below requires it.
Connect your tools
Claude Cowork is more powerful when it works directly with your systems. You control permissions and access. Learn about tool access(opens in new tab).
Navigate to Customize → Connectors in Cowork to set up.
Set your working folder
Drag the files you'll use (production screenshots, the PR diffs you're reviewing, your tokens file, the component inventory) into one folder on your machine, then point Cowork at it. Cowork reads from it and writes the drift report back to it. If you run design QA regularly, create a Cowork project(opens in new tab) from that folder so your system source stays attached.
The prompt
Copy this into Claude Cowork
Review the shipped screens and open PRs in this folder against our design system. For each one, list every place it drifts from our tokens, components, spacing, or interaction patterns, rate the severity, and suggest the system-compliant fix. Skip anything that already matches.
Why this works
Spell out what to check for. Tokens, components, spacing, interaction: the checklist is explicit.
Ask for a severity on each finding. Triage knows what to fix this sprint.
Say what to leave out. The report is only the work, never the noise.
Put the reference files in the folder. Tokens and inventory are read, not remembered.
Get a better draft
Add an example to match. Drop an example you like into the folder and Cowork matches your structure and voice.
Ask it to flag uncertainty. Add "flag anything you're not confident about" so you know where to look first when you review the draft.
Make Cowork work for you
The plugin's /design-system is a generic starting point. Once Step 2 produces a drift report you'd actually post on a PR, tell Cowork to write your version of the skill. Layer in your severity thresholds, your allowed exceptions, your component-to-code mapping, and the comment tone your engineers respond to. A few minutes of conversation and the skill runs with your standards from then on.
Make what we've done in this task so far into a skill, or edit the /design-system skill with my feedback.
Make it repeatable
Make it a live artifact
Drift compounds quietly between sprints. Ask Cowork to publish the report as a live artifact and the design-system team has one link that stays current — re-run the skill or schedule it to refresh.
Publish that drift report as a live artifact for the design-system channel. Keep a running tally of high-severity items still open.
Run it on every PR that touches UI
Drift is cheapest to catch before merge. Type /schedule in the prompt, or open Scheduled in the Cowork sidebar, and set the customized skill to run twice a day, checking open PRs and the latest production screenshots.
/schedule Weekdays at 10am and 4pm, check open PRs labeled "ui" and Design-QA/Sprint-42 for new screens, run /design-system on each, and post the drift report as a comment or to #design-system.
At 10am and 4pm, checks open UI PRs and the QA folder, runs /design-system, and posts the drift report as a PR comment or to #design-system.
Share with your teammates
Your customized /design-system now carries your tokens, your component map, your severity scale, and your exception list. Share it so every squad gets the same review on every PR, and the system team stops being the bottleneck for "is this on-system."