A surface is not one screen; it's a set of states. The trio engineers cut first and AI invents worst — empty, loading, error — is often the first thing a real user sees, and the interaction states (hover/active/focus/disabled/success) are where the interface either feels alive or feels broken. Design all of them deliberately.
Design The States is a community-contributed Claude Code skill in the design-creative sub-category. It ships as a SKILL.md file that Claude Code auto-discovers under ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states/ and loads when your prompt matches the skill's trigger.
When to invoke it: Use whenever designing any surface or component — design the full set of states, not just the happy path. The underrated trio (empty, loading, error) plus every interaction state (hover, active, focus, disabled, success) are deliberate moments, not afterthoughts.
The Design The States Claude Code skill is built for Claude Code users and developers across all disciplines looking for general-purpose AI assistance. It's part of ClaudSkills (also referred to as Claude Skills or Claude Code Skills) — the open community-curated registry of 146,000+ SKILL.md files for Anthropic's Claude Code agent and the wider Claude ecosystem (Claude API, Claude Agent SDK).
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states curl -L https://claudskills.com/skills/design-the-states/SKILL.md \ -o ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states/SKILL.md
Or just download SKILL.md directly and drop it into ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states/. Claude Code auto-discovers it on next session.
Skills live at ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states/SKILL.md on macOS/Linux, or %USERPROFILE%\.claude\skills\design-the-states\SKILL.md on Windows. See the full install guide for step-by-step instructions.
Open @claudskills_bot on Telegram, tap Open Desktop App, and the desktop app installs this skill for you. Or share the bot link with a colleague — they get the same one-tap install. Learn more →
The ClaudSkills desktop app installs any skill directly into ~/.claude/skills/ with one click — no terminal required. Pro starts at $9/mo or $149 lifetime.
For the full experience including quality scoring and one-click install features for each skill — upgrade to Pro.
SKILL.md from the source repository to ~/.claude/skills/design-the-states/SKILL.md and restart Claude Code. Both flows are detailed at claudskills.com/install/.SKILL.md file that lives under ~/.claude/skills/<name>/ and tells the Claude Code CLI agent how to perform a specific task (instructions, prompts, allowed tools). Skills are auto-discovered at session start. Design The States is one of 67,000+ skills indexed in the open ClaudSkills catalog, classified under the General category. Learn more at /learn/what-is-a-claude-skill/.If you reference this skill in a blog post, paper, or documentation, you can cite it as:
@misc{design-the-states-2026,
author = {wastedcode},
title = {Design The States [Claude Code skill]},
year = {2026},
publisher = {ClaudSkills},
url = {https://claudskills.com/skills/design-the-states/}
}Grade A · scanned 2026-07-06 — free static scan against the OWASP Agentic Skills Top 10.
No risk patterns were found in any of the ten OWASP-aligned categories. How grading works ›
Browse all General skills in the ClaudSkills registry, or explore these other picks from the same category:
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SKILL.md files, not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Anthropic.