Carbon — a Claude skill for the IBM Carbon Design System

A Claude skill that teaches Claude to build UIs with Carbon — IBM's open-source design system. It bundles a faithful, offline copy of Carbon's in-repo documentation as structured Markdown references, with a concise, task-oriented guide on top.

What it does

Ask Claude to build a UI with Carbon — or anything involving @carbon/react, @carbon/web-components, Carbon Sass/styles, themes, the 2x Grid, Carbon icons, or feature flags — and the skill activates so Claude answers from the real docs instead of guessing. It covers:

• Component usage for both flagship libraries — @carbon/react (React) and @carbon/web-components (the cds-* custom elements), including feature-flagged behavior
• Styling with @carbon/styles Sass — @use, Dart Sass setup, per-component imports, the cds class prefix
• Theming — white/g10/g90/g100, the <Theme> component, $theme with-config, Layer
• Elements (foundations) — @carbon/colors, @carbon/themes, @carbon/grid, @carbon/layout, @carbon/type (IBM Plex), @carbon/motion, @carbon/icons(-react/-vue), @carbon/pictograms
• Feature flags & preview code, and the v10 → v11 migration

What's inside

skills/carbon/
├── SKILL.md            # the guide Claude loads on trigger (workflow + reference map)
└── references/         # 245 pages of faithful Markdown from the Carbon monorepo
    ├── CONTENTS.md     # full navigation, by section
    ├── react/components/         @carbon/react component usage (one file per component)
    ├── web-components/components/ @carbon/web-components (cds-*) usage
    ├── elements/       per-package READMEs (styles, themes, colors, grid, type, icons, …)
    ├── guides/         Sass, accessibility, icons, colors, IBM Plex, feature flags, …
    ├── migration/      v11 and per-element v10.x → v11 migration guides
    └── LICENSE         # upstream documentation license (Apache-2.0, IBM Corp.)

Every reference page keeps a > Source: link to its file on github.com/carbon-design-system/carbon. Design and usage guidance for the system as a whole lives at https://www.carbondesignsystem.com.

Installation

Via npx skills (recommended)

npx skills add iamursky/carbon-skill

Claude Desktop / Web

1. Download skills/carbon/SKILL.md
2. Go to Customize → Skills → + → Upload a skill
3. Upload SKILL.md
4. The skill activates automatically when you ask about Carbon, @carbon/react, or @carbon/web-components

Manual install for Claude Code

# Personal (available across all projects)
git clone https://github.com/iamursky/carbon-skill ~/carbon-skill
ln -s ~/carbon-skill/skills/carbon ~/.claude/skills/carbon

# Per-project (shared with the team via git)
git clone https://github.com/iamursky/carbon-skill .carbon-skill
ln -s .carbon-skill/skills/carbon .claude/skills/carbon

How it activates

The skill triggers automatically when you:

• Ask Claude to build a UI, screen, or component with Carbon
• Mention @carbon/react, @carbon/web-components, cds-* elements, @carbon/styles, or Carbon tokens
• Ask about Carbon theming (g10/g90/g100), the 2x Grid, Carbon icons / IBM Plex, or feature flags
• Need to migrate a Carbon project from v10 to v11

Provenance & license

The references/ are converted from the official carbon-design-system/carbon monorepo — the colocated Storybook MDX (component usage), the per-package READMEs (the foundational elements), and selected root docs/ guides — and kept faithful. Live Storybook <Canvas> demos and the auto-generated <ArgTypes> prop tables can't be rendered statically, so each page keeps its Source code link and a pointer to the live Storybook for the exact API. They are redistributed under the upstream Apache-2.0 license (skills/carbon/references/LICENSE).

The skill itself — SKILL.md, structure, and this repository — is MIT licensed; see license.

Unofficial, community-built skill. Not affiliated with or endorsed by IBM or the Carbon Design System.