Skip to main content

Search rules

Search all UI Guides rules by name, category, or source

performanceTailwind

Avoid Arbitrary Values

SHOULD

SHOULD: Avoid arbitrary values [17px]; use theme tokens (p-4, text-foreground)

Prefer theme tokens over arbitrary bracket values

Bad

Good

Why it matters

Arbitrary values create one-off utility classes that bypass your design system's spacing/color scale, create inconsistencies, generate additional CSS, and make maintenance harder with magic numbers scattered throughout.

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.