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design@Ibelick

Use Tailwind Default Shadows

SHOULD

SHOULD: Use Tailwind CSS default shadow scale (shadow-sm, shadow, shadow-md) unless explicitly requested. Custom shadows often clash with the design system.

Stick with Tailwind's default shadow scale instead of custom values

Bad

Good

Why it matters

That is the rule verbatim from the baseline-ui skill; everything below is ours. The scale is designed as one ramp lit from a single source, so elevation reads as depth rather than as noise; hand-rolled shadows with different blur, offset, and direction give you three cards that no longer sit in the same room. Get the names right, because they moved in v4: the scale runs `shadow-2xs`, `shadow-xs`, `shadow-sm`, `shadow-md`, `shadow-lg`, `shadow-xl`, `shadow-2xl`, and there is no bare `shadow` class any more.

Worse than missing, the old names silently changed meaning — v4's `shadow-sm` renders what v3's bare `shadow` did, and v3's `shadow-sm` is now `shadow-xs`. So a v3 codebase that upgrades without a codemod does not break loudly; every `shadow-sm` in it just quietly gets one step heavier.

References

Built by Gleb Stroganov, design engineer at Evil Martians.

The rules come from other people's skills and guidelines — Vercel, Rauno Freiberg, @Ibelick, impeccable, Emil Kowalski, Tailwind, RAMS — each one credited on the Sources page. The work here is extraction and wiring: every rule is pulled into one corpus, given a good and a bad example you can operate, a MUST/SHOULD/NEVER rule an agent can paste, and a link back to where it came from.