FaqSection

Founders and designers building a product with a coding agent who want it to look like one product, not a pile of good-looking screens, and teams that need to see what the agent changed and why.

No, your agent does, with full freedom of taste. Coherent gives it a system to design within (tokens, components with IDs, the rule to reuse before creating) and checks every change. We stopped generating UI ourselves after plain Claude Code beat our own pipeline on every matched screen of the same spec. The old generator still works with `coherent init --classic`, but it is deprecated.

A `/design-system` section inside your app: color, type, radius, shadow and spacing tokens (light and dark where defined, with contrast), your type scale, your icons, every UI primitive and product component with its ID, props, a real use from your code, the pages it is on, the tokens it uses and its edit history, a sitemap, docs and recommendations. Primitives get live previews automatically; for your own components the agent writes one. Coherent writes the section from your code and rebuilds it inside every edit.

It is a route of your app, so it ships wherever your app ships. This site keeps its own public: open /design-system. To keep yours internal, protect the route like any other page, or remove it before you deploy; the agent regenerates it on the next edit.

No. An ID is a one-line comment above a component (`/** @coherent-id CID-008 */`). The app is plain Next.js, Tailwind and shadcn/ui; remove Coherent and everything keeps working.

Claude Code (CLI and desktop app), tested end to end: `init` sets up the agent, the MCP server and the write guard. Codex gets the MCP server and the same rules in AGENTS.md, without a write guard; it works, but is not yet tested end to end. Other MCP clients can call the same tools, untested.

Yes, if it is a Next.js App Router app with Tailwind (v3 or v4). Run `npx @getcoherent/cli init` in it, then ask your agent to sync the design system: your components get IDs and `/design-system` appears, with the pages checked to render exactly as before (dynamic routes need an example URL). Recommendations then list what to clean up, such as hardcoded colors and sizes; this site went from 403 to 0, one verified edit at a time. Yarn Plug'n'Play is not supported yet.

Not yet. Coherent reads the component graph from TSX and Next.js routes, and generates the design system as Next pages, so each framework is real work. Vote for the one you need (GitHub issue #168 on skovtun/coherent-design-method); a framework-neutral verify-only mode is the likely first step.

That only the declared files changed; no new TypeScript errors (compared to before the edit); a production build; desktop and mobile renders of the affected routes (up to 12 per edit; any not rendered are named in the verdict), and an exact pixel comparison of control routes (±1 per channel for anti-aliasing); with a dark theme, desktop in the other theme too; no new console, page or hydration errors (also in Safari's engine when Playwright WebKit is installed); every new component has an ID; no real names or emails from git config in the UI. Hardcoded colors and sizes come back as warnings.

Yes. Splitting a page into components, replacing hardcoded values with tokens of the same value, renames: the agent marks the edit as a refactor, and every affected page must then render pixel for pixel as before. This site's home page was split into 13 components that way.

It is not committed. The edit stays open: the agent fixes it and checks again, or rolls it back. A rollback restores only that edit's own files, byte for byte, and leaves every other file alone. You can ask "undo that" later too; if a newer edit touched the same files, Coherent refuses unless you confirm.

A little, on purpose. A full check builds the app and renders the affected pages: about one to three minutes per edit on real apps, more on heavy pages. The quick check skips the build and the browser and takes seconds.

Coherent needs none: it runs locally and only checks. You need access to your coding agent, such as a Claude Code plan.

Agent mode is new in v0.27, the design system in v0.28–0.31. Verified on real apps, including this site, which runs on Coherent; the repository has 2,600+ passing tests; MIT licensed. Known gaps: Windows is untested; dynamic routes need an example URL in `.coherent/preview-params.json` to be rendered; pages that depend on live data or the current time need fixtures to compare cleanly; canvas and WebGL animations must hold still under prefers-reduced-motion, or renders differ from run to run.

GitHub issues for bugs and feature requests — response usually within 24h. The decision records, changelog and backlog are open in the repo, so you can see what shipped, what is planned, and why.