Comparison
Rams vs design skills
A skill gives your agent an opinion about your code. Rams keeps a record. We ship a free skill ourselves, so this comparison comes from experience with both.
Design skills are markdown instruction files that coding agents like Claude Code, Cursor, and Codex load to review UI code locally. Good ones encode real judgment from real design engineers, they run instantly on your working tree, and they are free. Rams publishes one of the most-installed design skills, so we mean it when we say they are worth using.
A skill run is also stateless. It reviews what is in front of it, once, and remembers nothing. It cannot tell you whether you fixed what it flagged last time, whether this PR is better than the last one, or whether your teammate who never installed it just merged a keyboard trap. Rams is the same kind of judgment run as a system: the hosted engine reviews every pull request with the same rules every time, verifies your fixes on the next push, and keeps a score with history. The number means something because it is computed the same way tomorrow as today.
Rams vs Design skills, side by side
| Dimension | Rams | Design skills |
|---|---|---|
| What it is | A hosted review system with state | An instruction file your agent runs |
| Consistency | Same 119 rules, every review, versioned | Whatever the model emphasizes that run |
| Verifies your fixes | Yes — re-reviews check each finding, score climbs | No — each run starts from zero |
| Score | 0-100 with history; any critical caps it at 59 | A number if you ask, different next run |
| Team coverage | Every PR from every contributor, no local setup | Only devs who installed it, only when they run it |
| False-positive control | Server-side auditors (computed contrast ratios, context guards) | Model output, unchecked |
| Improves over time | Engine updates ship to everyone continuously | When the author edits the file and you reinstall |
| Cost | Free tier; paid plans for private repos and volume | Free |
Use Rams when you want to…
- A design bar the whole team is held to, not just skill users
- Knowing your fixes actually resolved what was flagged
- A score you can gate merges on and track over months
- Reviewing contributors and AI agents who never installed anything
Use Design skills when you want to…
- Instant local feedback while you are still editing
- Solo projects where you are the only committer
- Zero-setup experimentation with design review
- Working offline or outside GitHub entirely
The bottom line
Use both, in sequence. A local skill (ours is free: curl -fsSL rams.ai/install | bash) catches problems while you edit. Rams catches what reaches the pull request, verifies the fixes, and keeps the score. The skill is hygiene. The system is the record.
Common questions
Why would I pay for Rams when skills are free?
For the parts a stateless file cannot do: the same rules applied identically on every PR, verification that your fixes resolved the findings, a score with history you can trust and gate on, and coverage of every contributor including the ones who never installed anything. If you work alone and review your own code locally every time, the free skill may genuinely be enough.
Is the Rams skill the same as the Rams engine?
No. The skill is a free local approximation: a strong heuristic checklist your agent runs. The hosted engine is 119 versioned rules with server-side verification, false-positive auditing, scoring, and re-review of fixes. The skill tells you what its output is and where the full engine lives.
Can my coding agent use the Rams engine directly?
Yes. The Rams MCP exposes the hosted engine as a tool, so Claude Code, Cursor, or any MCP-capable agent can request a real scored review before code is even committed, with the same rules and metering as PR reviews.
Do skills from well-known design engineers compete with Rams?
They overlap on the local review moment, and the good ones are worth running. We publish a skill in the same directories ourselves. The difference is not the judgment, it is the system around it: consistency, verification, history, and team coverage need a service, not a file.
See what Rams finds on your repo.
Free on public repos. Every pull request reviewed for design quality, with inline fixes.
Review my public repoFree