AddThisFeature

Class Merge Helper

Combine conditional classes in one place so the last one written actually wins.

moderate CSS & Styling

What it adds

A single helper every component uses to resolve base, conditional, and caller-supplied classes into one final list.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Find every component that currently builds a class string by hand and route all of them through one helper, so the resolution rules are identical everywhere.

  2. 2

    Define the precedence plainly: the component's own base classes lose to its variant classes, and both lose to whatever the caller passed in. A caller that supplies a class expects it to take effect.

  3. 3

    Accept the shapes calling code actually produces rather than forcing every call site to normalise first, and make the behaviour for absent and empty values explicit rather than incidental.

  4. 4

    Detect and collapse conflicting utilities that set the same property, keeping the last one, so a caller adjusting one aspect of a component does not have to fight a base class that is still present.

  5. 5

    Do not let this helper decide policy. Which utilities are permitted and when a pattern should be extracted belong to Utility Class Conventions; this helper only resolves what it is given.

Edge cases it handles

6
  • A caller passing a class to change one property must win over the component's own class for that property. If the base class survives, the override silently does nothing and the caller will reach for importance flags instead.
  • Values arriving as lists, as objects keyed by condition, and as absent or empty entries must all be handled without special-casing at the call site, and must never contribute stray separators or empty entries to the output.
  • Conflicts between classes belonging to different systems — a utility framework class against a hand-written or component class targeting the same property — cannot be resolved by name matching alone. Define the resolution rule and state its limits.
  • An invalid or misspelled class name must survive to the output unchanged rather than being quietly dropped, because a helper that swallows typos turns a visible styling bug into an invisible one.
  • The helper runs on every render of every component, so its cost is multiplied by the size of the tree and must stay proportionate to the classes it is given.
  • Ordering must be stable: the same inputs must produce the same output string every time, or server-rendered and client-rendered markup will disagree.

Definition of done

8
  • Every component composes classes through the single helper, with no hand-built class strings remaining.
  • Caller-supplied classes reliably override the component's own classes for the same property.
  • Lists, condition maps, and absent values are all accepted and produce no empty or duplicated entries.
  • Conflicting utilities setting the same property collapse to the last one given.
  • Unrecognised class names pass through unchanged.
  • The same inputs always produce the same output string.
  • The feature matches the existing design system.
  • No existing functionality is broken.

Related features

How it works

  1. 1

    Copy the link

    Grab the Markdown instruction URL for this feature.

  2. 2

    Give it to your AI

    Paste it into Claude Code, Cursor, v0, Lovable — whatever you build with.

  3. 3

    It inspects, then implements

    Your agent reads your existing app first, then adds the feature to fit it.

Works with your stack

These instructions are written to adapt. They tell the agent to detect your framework, match your existing design system, and reuse what you already have — rather than assuming a particular stack.

Need it tighter than that? Customize the feature and tell it exactly what you're running.