Meta has open-sourced Asterisk, their internal design system built and refined over 8 years, now available as a React/StyleX component library with 150+ components. What sets it apart is being the first design system explicitly designed for AI agents to read and build with — it ships with a CLI, MCP support, and auto-configures agent instruction files (claude.md, agent.md) so tools like Claude Code can work from documented facts rather than guessing. The post walks through installation with npm, a Next.js app router gotcha with template placement, and how the CLI avoids filling up context windows. The author also demonstrates building a custom 'Asterisk Max' skill that runs the manifest command to expose all CLI flags, uses headless Chrome screenshots for visual QA, and integrates an 'AI slop detector' skill to catch and fix generic AI-generated design patterns — producing significantly better results than using Asterisk alone.
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