AddThisFeature

CSS Module Boundaries

Keep each component's styles its own, and make the shared parts deliberate.

moderate CSS & Styling

What it adds

A boundary around each component's styles, exposing only a named set of hooks that callers are permitted to style through.

What your agent is told to do

5
  1. 1

    Identify the primitives the rest of the app builds on — button, field, card, menu, table — and treat everything inside them as private unless it is deliberately published.

  2. 2

    For each primitive, publish an explicit surface: the variants it accepts, the slots a caller may target, and the custom properties it reads. Anything not on that list is internal and may change without notice.

  3. 3

    Find the places where product screens currently reach into a primitive's internals and rewrite them to use the published surface, adding a variant or a slot where the need is legitimate.

  4. 4

    Make the boundary enforceable rather than advisory, so a reach-in selector is caught during review or in the build instead of being discovered when a primitive is refactored months later.

  5. 5

    Do not attempt to solve precedence here. Which rule wins when two collide belongs to CSS Layer Strategy; this feature decides who is allowed to write the second rule at all.

Edge cases it handles

7
  • Selectors that reach past a component's root into its internal elements must be rejected, because they silently couple a screen to markup the primitive's author is free to change.
  • Theming needs a defined way in. Publish the named custom properties a component reads and let callers set those, rather than leaving people to guess and target internal class names.
  • Composition between modules must not become circular. A chain in which one component's styles compose from another that composes back produces an order that depends on import sequence and will differ between builds.
  • Product screens overriding a primitive's internals is the exact failure this feature exists to stop, and it must be treated as a defect rather than a shortcut, even when the override is small and works today.
  • Generated or utility class names that appear inside a primitive are still internal; a caller matching on them has reached in by another route.
  • Some overrides are genuinely necessary before the right variant exists. Give them a marked, temporary escape hatch that is visible in a search, rather than pretending the need does not arise.
  • A component rendering into a portal or an overlay leaves its parent's scope, so styles that relied on ancestry will stop applying and must be passed in deliberately.

Definition of done

8
  • Every shared primitive has a documented public surface of variants, slots, and custom properties.
  • No product screen selector targets a primitive's internal elements.
  • Theming happens through published custom properties rather than internal class names.
  • Module composition has no cycles and produces the same result regardless of import order.
  • Boundary violations are caught by review or by the build, not at runtime.
  • Temporary overrides are marked and findable by search.
  • 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.