A Yelmo design.md is a markdown file with five sections. It lives on your profile and gets served to any agent that installs your MCP. Twenty minutes the first time, less every time you sharpen it.
How I work
Open with how you actually start a problem. Not your CV. Not your tools. The first hour of a project: what do you do? What do you frame? What do you discard?
Example: "The first hour of any problem goes into framing it: what's the smallest version that proves the idea? After that, design is mostly editing."
The agent reads this and learns your default mode. When it generates work in your name, it imitates this rhythm.
What I look for
What makes you save something. The criteria — not the things. If you write "I like brutalist UIs," that's noise. If you write "I save things that hold a principle quietly, the way good furniture holds a room," the agent has criteria it can apply.
Tools
The three or four tools that actually shape how you work. Not the full stack. The constants. Figma, Cursor, Claude, your own scripts. Whatever rotates doesn't go here.
Influences
People, products, ideas. Link freely. Public links are gold — the agent can fetch them when asked. "I learned from Dieter Rams" is fine. "I learned from Dieter Rams, especially these ten principles" is better.
Recent thinking
What you're chewing on this week. This section is the most volatile and the most useful. An agent that knows you're currently rethinking how to handle long-form content will weight your recent design accordingly.
What not to put in it
- Your bio. That's the profile, not the design.md.
- Generic principles ("user-first," "simplicity matters"). The agent can't act on these.
- Brand-specific design tokens. That's a Google design.md, a different document.
- Examples without commentary. Show the work AND say why you picked it.
Now write yours → Get started