New changes to Kernic

A design system is more than colors and fonts

kernic now decides the rest as well: spacing, shadows, motion, line heights and weights, breakpoints and containers, all derived from the choices you already made, and all written into every export.

• Shadows that belong to your palette. Five levels, tinted from your own darkest neutral rather than plain black, so a warm system throws a warm shadow. Each level has a light and a dark value, and the dark set is denser so it still reads on a dark surface. They land in CSS, Tailwind, the W3C tokens and the shadcn theme.
• Motion with a temperament. Each vibe sets one of three presets: calm, brisk or lively. That gives you fast, base and slow durations and three easing curves, none of which overshoot. The CSS export turns durations to zero under prefers-reduced-motion.
• Type that comes with its line height. Every step of the scale carries a leading value, and the system names its weights and tracking. DESIGN.md roles now cite weight, line height and letter spacing from those tokens.
• Spacing, breakpoints and containers as tokens. A spacing unit for Tailwind, named steps for everything else, and breakpoints and containers that match Tailwind's defaults. DESIGN.md gains a Layout section with all of them and a prose measure.
• Dark mode in the Tailwind export. Semantic colors and shadows sit on :root and .dark and reach the theme through @theme inline, the way shadcn wires its variables, so dark: works without a second file. A system saved by an earlier kernic is filled in with all of this the first time it loads.

kernic writes the files the rest of your stack already reads

One command puts a DESIGN.md for coding agents, W3C design tokens and a shadcn theme into your project, each in the format its reader expects.

• DESIGN.md, in the format coding agents already know. kernic writes Google's DESIGN.md spec: every token in the front matter, and the rules to follow in the prose, ending with a Do and Don't list. Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and Gemini CLI read it as is. Every generated file is checked against Google's own linter before a release ships.
• A shadcn theme, ready for npx shadcn add. kernic export <name> -f shadcn writes a registry item with your colors as oklch() values for light and dark, your fonts and your radius, mapped onto shadcn's role names. The shadcn MCP server reads the same file, so an agent in a shadcn project gets your tokens through the tool it already has.
• W3C design tokens in the 2025.10 stable format. Colors carry OKLCH components plus a hex fallback, dimensions carry a value and a unit, and each semantic role points at the ramp stop it came from. Terrazzo, Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio and Figma's importers all read it.
• kernic context writes all three at once. DESIGN.md, tokens.json and shadcn.json land together; add --no-shadcn for a project that does not use shadcn. Your assistant's apply_to_project writes the same set, and takes include for stylesheets and exclude to leave a standard file out.
• The brief is called DESIGN.md now. It takes the name the spec uses. A design.md from an earlier kernic is still recognized as kernic's own, still regenerated by kernic apps, and still replaced rather than blocked when you re-apply.

Your coding assistant can set up your design system

kernic could already show an AI assistant your colors and fonts. It could not put them into your project. Now it can.

• Ask your coding assistant to style your app, and it can. Ask Claude Code or Cursor to apply your design system and it writes the files, then tells you the one line to add so every future session picks it up. It can also create a system from scratch if you do not have one yet, so you are never stuck at an empty list.
• Your assistant can see all 33 looks, not just the 8 styles. A look is a finished decision: colors, fonts, corners and text sizes, all chosen to go together. Your assistant could only see the broad styles before. Now it can offer you the finished ones.
• Exporting everything now includes design.md. This is the file that tells an AI assistant which colors and fonts to use, and to stop inventing its own. It was the one file "export everything" left out, which is exactly backwards. You can also export it on its own, or export standard W3C design tokens.
• kernic apps shows your design across every project. One command, one list. If a project has fallen behind because you changed the system since, it says so, and prints the exact command to bring it back.
• kernic will not overwrite a file it did not write. tokens.json is also the filename Style Dictionary, Tokens Studio and Figma Tokens use. If you had one, kernic used to replace it with no warning and no backup. It now leaves your file alone and tells you it did.
• Smaller fixes. kernic --version reported 0.1.0 whichever version you had. The docs described the wrong first command: running kernic has opened the visual editor since 0.1.3, and the terminal walkthrough is kernic wizard.

BetaStudio is still in beta. Picking a font works properly again: you can reach every Google Font instead of an arbitrary 30, search as you type, and pick with the keyboard. It is also much faster, and no longer requests the same fonts so often that Google starts refusing them. Studio’s local server has been hardened, so it now refuses requests from other sites on your machine. If you use kernic studio, this release is worth taking.

Two bugs in how systems are saved and listed

• One bad file no longer hides all the others. A single corrupted file used to take down the whole list, hiding every system you had.
• Moving from an older config folder is safe. The migration could remove the old folder without having moved anything out of it first.

A full test suite, and a check that runs on every change

• Nothing you can see. But it is why the bugs above were found at all.

Running kernic now opens the visual editor

• Colors are easier to pick by eye. The terminal walkthrough is still there, and is now kernic wizard.

You name your system at the end, not the start

• Naming comes last. Naming a thing before you have seen it is harder than naming it after.

The first public releases

• Design systems from one command. Colors built with real color science so every shade stays even, font pairings from the full Google Fonts catalogue, text sizes, corner radii and gradients.
• Eight styles and a set of finished looks. Somewhere to start, including a gradient style for fintech-flavoured products.
• Exports and agent context. CSS variables, a Tailwind v4 theme, JSON, or font tags. Plus kernic context and kernic mcp, so AI coding assistants read your design system instead of inventing colors as they go.