- What is Layr?
- Layr Design Reference is an open, source-backed reference for interface design decisions. It documents 30 established design principles across 5 categories and 2 original Layr rules, and publishes each one twice: as a reading page for people and as Markdown for software agents.
- Who is it for?
- Designers, frontend and product engineers, and the coding agents that review their work. A designer uses a rule page to settle a decision; an agent reads the same rule to justify a review finding against the interface in front of it.
- How do agents use it?
- Every page has a Markdown twin linked with
rel="alternate", and /llms.txt maps the whole reference for retrieval. A rule's Markdown adds what the reading page does not need: the observable signals that make the rule apply, the review procedure, and the finding contract — the exact YAML shape a report has to emit. - What problem does it solve?
- Design guidance is usually written for people to interpret, so an agent asked to review an interface falls back on generic advice like “improve hierarchy.” Layr replaces that with rules carrying observable evidence, severity and confidence, so a finding names the component, the signal and the consequence.
- What makes it different?
- Established principles such as Fitts's Law and Hick's Law are attributed to their original research, never claimed as Layr inventions; Layr contributes the interpretation and the agent guidance. The original rule, the Intentionality Law, covers a problem the classic literature predates: AI slop, the visual and copy defaults that appear when nobody chose them.