Set up
Try a plugin
The Design plugin ships with /design-handoff and other design-system skills as a starting point, already structured to inventory components and cross-reference where they live. 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 (a Figma export of the design system, screenshots of the surfaces you already know about, the product sitemap) into one folder and point Cowork at it. Cowork reads from it and writes the audit back to it. Create a Cowork project(opens in new tab) from your design-system folder so the component inventory and ownership map stay attached for every audit.
The prompt
Copy this into Claude Cowork
Before I propose a new inline-filter pattern for the search results page, find every surface in our product using something similar (chips, segmented controls, dropdown filters, faceted sidebars). For each, show a screenshot or Figma link, note which team owns it and how it performed (engagement or conversion if we have it). Tell me which pattern to reuse and why.
Why this works
Name the variants to search for. Chips, segmented controls, dropdowns, facets are how the same intent shows up under different names; naming them widens the search.
Ask for the owner. You'll need to talk to that team either way; the audit doubles as your stakeholder list.
Back the recommendation with data. "How that surface performed" turns the recommendation from taste into evidence for the design crit.
Put your reference list in the folder. Cowork starts from your component list, then checks the live product for what's drifted.
Get a better draft
Ask for the consolidation plan. Add "if I should reuse one, list which other surfaces should migrate to it too" and the audit becomes a design-system roadmap item.
Add a screenshot of the destination. Drop a screenshot of where the pattern is going and Cowork weighs fit, not just precedent.
Make Cowork work for you
A plugin skill is a starting point — customize it with your own practices and expertise. A few minutes of conversation and it runs with your standards from then on.
Make what we've done in this task so far into a skill, or edit the /design-handoff skill with my feedback.
Make it repeatable
Make it the default first step
This audit should run before any new pattern enters review. Save it as a skill the whole design org can call with one line, swapping the pattern name each time, so "did we check what already exists" stops being a crit-week surprise.
Save this as /pattern-audit. It should take a pattern name, search Figma, the codebase, and Amplitude for existing instances, and write the side-by-side with a reuse recommendation to Design-system/Audits/<pattern>.md.
Share with your teammates
Your customized /pattern-audit now carries your component inventory, your ownership map, and your performance lookups. Share it so every designer runs the same check before crit, and the design system stops growing five ways to do one thing.