# "1 variable 0 single, don't mark it red −100%": a seller of a small Mac tool turned his dashboard rules into a Claude Code skill; 17 days, 384 stars · GitHub open-source project

> Source: https://stringers.io/en/github/gh_abdiraimov-otabek__dashboard-design-skill.html (Stringers / 什么值得做, generated 2026-11-08)
> Stringers answers one question every day: what small product can one or two people build in a few months and actually make money from. Numbers come from 15 databases we collect daily, each with source and date.
> For agents: these verdicts and the underlying databases (verified revenue, App Store / Google Play charts, ad libraries, GitHub, Product Hunt…) are queryable live over MCP — tools today / hot / products / directions / direction / data. Setup: https://github.com/komako-workshop/stringers (the user logs in at stringers.io → "配置 agent" to get a personal URL). Site index: https://stringers.io/llms.txt

> It holds the specific scenario name "dashboard" and writes its rules as easy-to-grasp counterexamples (1 changes by 0 and a single one shouldn't be marked red −100%). It started on Reddit and Medium, and after Chinese account GitHubDaily recommended it (11-05), it gained +115 stars in one day.

[GitHub open-source project](https://stringers.io/en/github/index.md) · written 11-6

abdiraimov-otabek/dashboard-design-skill · abdiraimov-otabek

# "1 variable 0 single, don't mark it red −100%": a seller of a small Mac tool turned his dashboard rules into a Claude Code skill; 17 days, 384 stars

**What it is:** an open-source skill pack for Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor that teaches AI coding agents to build data dashboards that look good without misleading anyone. After building, the agent must take screenshots at three screen widths to self-check.

**Why it took off** It claims the concrete scenario name "dashboard" and spells the rule out as a clear counterexample (1 variable, 0 variable with the red marking −100%). It started on Reddit and Medium, and after the Chinese account GitHubDaily recommended it, it gained 115 stars in a single day (11-05).

**B** **How you could follow it:** stop building dashboards. Pick an interface scenario with no dedicated skill yet (settings pages, onboarding, pricing pages, a specific native ecosystem), follow the same structure: comparison table, sources, and screenshot self-checks. Post a long write-up on Reddit, then translate the comparison table into Chinese to find Chinese recommenders.

Grade B: clear approach, cheap to make, and nobody has copied it yet, but skills like this have a ceiling of a few hundred to a thousand or two stars. Top general design skills are huge accounts with hundreds of thousands of stars, and official built-in skills could absorb your scenario at any time. Circulating in a small circle

Data (updated daily) · Repo created 2026-10-20 · 405 stars · 7 days +210

GitHub · stars

Data 2026-10-21 → 2026-11-08 (19 days, 18 observations). Points before 10-28 come from deeply / archive backfill, not every day has one

dashboard-design-skill is a Claude Code skill pack written by one independent developer, Otabek Abdiraimov, from Uzbekistan. It teaches AI coding agents to make data dashboards that "look good and don't lie". It contains no code, only eleven Markdown files. Its growth came from a specific scenario name, a few instantly understandable counterexamples, a screenshot self-check, and one retweet from a Chinese GitHub recommendation account. The total is still small, but this approach costs almost nothing, and the same play can be run again on a different scenario.

### He only wanted to see which posts actually sold his app

Otabek makes two paid Mac tools: Halo, which turns the MacBook notch into a Dynamic Island-style display, sold as a one-time purchase for $9.99; and Shedi, a disk cleanup tool for developers. His Medium article opens with: "I build small Mac apps and wanted one screen to tell me which posts actually drove sales." To build that screen he reviewed 127 live dashboards and found that most of them were "quietly lying".

2026 年 10 月 20 日,他建了库,同一天在 Reddit 的 r/claudeskills 发帖:「I built a free Claude Code skill for clean dashboard UI, made with Claude Code from 127 real dashboard screens」。帖子下有人提了建议,他当天就改,1.3.0 的提交说明里写着「suggested on r/claudeskills」。第二天,Medium 长文《I studied 127 dashboards. Most of them quietly lie to you.》发出,当天 41 星,再过一天 94 星(GitHub 每日记录)。

### What it actually teaches the agent to do

The README has a "don't do this / do this instead" table. These are the entries that spread the most:

| Don't | Do this instead |
|---|---|
| 1 variable 0 single, shown in red **−100%** | Small grey text "was 1" |
| Axis ticks 2,103, 1,402 | Round numbers: 0, 1k, 2k |
| One explanatory sentence under every KPI number | One delta value plus one word for the baseline; put the explanation in a hover tooltip |
| On wide screens, a narrow column floating in the middle | The wider the screen, the more columns |
| Semicircle gauge dashboard | Bullet chart: one bar, one target line, a few grey background bands |

Two more things set it apart from the pile of 'make AI build a pretty UI' skills. First, every job ends with a screenshot self-check: render at 3440, 1440 and 375 widths, count the complete sentences on the page, target 0. That goes straight at the biggest flaw of coding agents: they read the code and never look at the screen. Second, every rule is sourced: Stephen Few, Tufte, Cole Nussbaumer Knaflic, Cleveland & McGill, NN/g, WCAG, and six Apple WWDC chart talks. The '127 dashboards' number is easy to remember, so it became the title.

Install is flexible too: a two-line command from the Claude Code plugin marketplace, or copy it into your skills directory. For Codex and Cursor, point AGENTS.md at it. There's a separate SwiftUI section.

### Where the stars came from

| Timeline | What happened | Stars |
|---|---|---|
| 10-20 | Repo created, Reddit first post, auto-indexed by a dozen skill directory sites | — |
| 10-21 | Medium long-form | 41(10-21)→ 94(10-22) |
| 10-22 ~ 10-28 | No new moves, about +5 a day | 132 |
| 10-28 / 10-29 | Posted 2.0; Reddit second post: 'My own skill built a dashboard I hated, so I redid it using Few, Tufte and Apple WWDC' | 165 (33 that day) |
| 10-30 ~ 11-02 | Chinese X account @GitTrend0x named 'dashboard designer' in a skills roundup thread (33 likes); Geek Lite followed | +7 ~ 10 per day |
| 11-05 | Singled out by @GitHub_Daily: 335 likes, 34 reposts, about 18k views | 230 → 345 (11-06 single day +115) |
| 11-06 | GitHub live check | 384 stars, 21 forks |

Star counts come from GitHub's daily records and the GitHub API (11-06).

Two things stand out. First, English-side buzz is limited to the r/claudeskills subreddit and a directory site: nothing on Hacker News, nothing on Product Hunt, no big English accounts reposting it. Second, the biggest wave came from Chinese recommendation accounts: one GitHubDaily post pushed daily stars to more than ten times the earlier daily average, and several of the 7 forks that appeared between 11-04 and 11-06 came from accounts with Chinese names, timed to match. Nearly all the Chinese reposts quote the same "counterexample to example" framing, which suggests that's the version worth copying.

### It's effectively an ad slot

The README ends with a section called 'From the maker' featuring Halo and Shedi, with links carrying `?ref=dashboard-design-skill`. The more aggressive move is in SKILL.md: after every dashboard job, the agent appends a line to its reply: 'Dashboard design by the dashboard-design skill, made by Otabek, who also makes Halo… and Shedi…'. The rules say it appears once per conversation, only after the work is done, and never in code or commits. The README notes the section can be deleted if unwanted.

So everyone who installs it sees his apps repeatedly in their own terminal. For open-source builders, this is a useful lesson: open source doesn't earn money by itself, but it can be the front door to your other products. The move may also irritate people, and there's no visible feedback in the comments so far (inference: the volume is still too small for anyone to care). How many sales the ref links brought in can't be seen from outside.

### Who is competing for the same spot

The 'make AI agents build good UI' spot was already crowded, but the big players are general-purpose:

| Name | Scale (GitHub, 11-06) | How it differs |
|---|---|---|
| nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill | 145,640 stars, +7 in 3,170 days | General UI/UX knowledge base; dashboards are just one category |
| anthropics/skills (frontend-design, etc.) | 187,695 stars | Official general frontend skill; Claude Code also ships a built-in dataviz skill covering charts, KPI cards and color, which overlaps head-on |
| Nutlope/hallmark | 48,631 stars, +7 in 6,737 days | General 'anti-AI-look' design, big accounts bring their own traffic |
| feimacode/open-design-agent-kit | 1,000 stars, +7 in 589 days | General professional UI kit |
| larashero3-dotcom/lieflat-charts | 6,724 stars | Turns data into interactive charts; handles the chart, not the whole page |
| aref-vc/tufte-claude-skill and others | A few hundred stars | Applies only Tufte principles to single charts |

The general skills are two to three orders of magnitude bigger, but no big account holds the specific 'dashboard' name. The other same-named skills in the roundups are short and have no screenshot self-check or before/after comparisons. It grew by owning a specific scenario name and making the content solid, not because there were no competitors. No one has been seen copying it yet.

### If it were you

**Bottom line:** Copy the playbook, but don't build another dashboard skill. 'Pick one concrete UI scenario + a sourced list of bad examples + screenshot self-check + before/after images + get Chinese recommendation accounts to pick it up' costs almost nothing and can be rerun on another scenario. The ceiling, though, is a few hundred to a thousand or two stars, and a built-in official skill could swallow your scenario at any time.

**Good fit for:** Developers or designers who have actually been burned on a certain kind of interface and have their own work to screenshot; indie devs with a paid product who want a long-term front door for it.

**Not a fit for:** Anyone aiming to hit tens of thousands of stars with this, since the top of general design skills is already held by big accounts. And people with no real project who just reshuffle design guidelines found online: without solid substance, the Chinese accounts won't repost it.

**How to do it:**

1. Pick a concrete scenario with no dedicated skill yet: settings pages, signup and onboarding, pricing pages, forms and error states, empty states, email templates, App Store screenshots, or full-page guidelines for an ecosystem (SwiftUI, Flutter, Jetpack Compose).

2. Structure the content the same way: a 'don't do this / do this instead' table at the top of the README where each row is clear at a glance; cite sources for every rule; end with a mandatory screenshot self-check that spells out which sizes to render and what to check.

3. Put before/after images in the README, and title it with a memorable number ('I reviewed N samples').

4. If you have your own product, link it in the README and the skill output, but state clearly how to turn it off.

**How to get users:** In English, post first to r/claudeskills and r/ClaudeCode, then write a long piece like 'I studied N X, and most of them get the same thing wrong'. A week later ship v2 and go around again with 'my own skill built something I hated'. Then translate the comparison table into Chinese and go after Chinese recommendation accounts at the GitHubDaily and GitTrend0x tier. That single post brought in +115 in one day.

**On timing:** The Claude Code skills wave is still hot, and directory sites and recommendation accounts are always hunting for new repos. My guess (inference) is the window runs in months; shipping before year-end looks fairly safe.

**Signs you've misjudged it:** Two weeks after release, the Reddit post gets no engagement, no Chinese account reposts, and stars sit in double digits. That means the scenario isn't painful enough or the bad examples aren't vivid enough. Or Claude Code officially ships a built-in skill covering your scenario, in which case it's time to pick a new topic.

[GitHub repo ↗](https://github.com/abdiraimov-otabek/dashboard-design-skill)

**Research notes: competitor table, acquisition evidence, full research report**

Competitors

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs from this one |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill | Open source | 2025-11-30 | 145,640★, +3170 over 7 days | General UI/UX knowledge base; dashboards are one category, with no data-honesty rules or screenshot QA |
| Nutlope/hallmark | Open source | 2026-04 (approx.) | 48,631★, +6737 over 7 days | General 'anti-AI-look' design skill, traffic carried by big accounts, not specialized for data pages |
| Anthropic's official skills (frontend-design) and Claude Code's built-in dataviz skill | Big-company features | From ¥2025-09-22 | anthropics/skills 187,695★; dataviz built into Claude Code | Official general frontend and chart guidance, available out of the box. It focuses more on full-page dashboards and is more opinionated (no sentences in charts, no percentages on small bases, screenshot acceptance required) |
| sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills · dashboard-design | Open source | 2026-01-14 | Collection 49,212★ | A generic layout skill inside a collection; short, no before/after comparisons or QA |
| larashero3-dotcom/lieflat-charts | Open source | 2026-07-16 | 6,724★ | Turns data into interactive HTML charts; leans toward chart output, with no design judgment for full dashboards |
| aref-vc/tufte-claude-skill / caylent/tufte-data-viz | Open source | 2026-05-23 / 2026-02-18 | 316★ / 232★ | Applies Tufte principles to single charts only; it combines Few, Tufte, NN/g and Apple WWDC and covers both full pages and components |
| feimacode/open-design-agent-kit | Open source | 2026-09-19 | 1,000★, +589 over 7 days | General professional UI design kit for multiple agents, not specialized in data honesty |
| ahpxex/open-dashboard | Open source | 2025-09-28 | 146★ | 36 copy-ready admin page code templates; they give code, not design rules or critique |

Where users come from

- **Verified** **Reddit r/claudeskills launch post** : 10-20 posted "I built a free Claude Code skill for clean dashboard UI…127 real dashboard screens" (Brave); 1.3.0 the submission note reads "suggested on r/claudeskills"; Upstar shows about 80★ on day one

- **Verified** **Medium opinion piece** : 10-21 'I studied 127 dashboards. Most of them quietly lie to you.' The README links it, and other people's Medium posts surface it in related recommendations

- **Verified** **Reddit v2 second post plus 2.0 release** : 10-28 posted 2.0.0 on r/claudeskills, 'My free Claude Code dashboard skill built a dashboard I hated… (v2)'; 10-29 +33 in a single day (our github repo)

- **Verified** **Chinese X recommendation accounts** : GitHubDaily 11-05 10:30 singled it out (❤335 🔁34 👁17,875), immediately followed by 11-06 +115 in one day, with Chinese-named forks appearing in the same period; GitTrend0x 10-30 roundup post ❤33; QingQ77 11-02

- **Verified** **Auto-indexed by skill directory sites** : skillsdirectory (10-20 scan, Grade A), skillsllm, agensi, claudius, aiagentslisting, prompthackers, gitbap, duink, upstar, star-history

- Inference **Links in older Reddit replies** : Brave summaries show the r/ClaudeCode 'Skill for Dashboard Style Guide' thread and an r/homeassistant post surfacing its title; these may be the author's replies, or related recommendations

## Why abdiraimov-otabek/dashboard-design-skill took off

**In one line:** A dashboard design skill pack for Claude Code by Otabek Abdiraimov, an independent Mac developer from Uzbekistan. In essence it's marketing material the author made to funnel users toward two paid Mac apps, Halo and Shedi. It gained traction through three things: two posts on Reddit r/claudeskills, a long Medium piece, and reposts from Chinese GitHub recommendation accounts, where a single 11-05 GitHubDaily post alone brought +115 stars in one day. Its selling point is very specific rules on honest data presentation plus a mandatory screenshot check after each job, which is rare among 'pretty UI' skills. Still, the total is only 384★, which is still small-circle territory.

### 1. Basic data

- Created 2026-10-20, single author, 7 commits, last one 10-28 with 2.0.0. MIT license, pure Markdown (1 SKILL.md files plus 10 reference docs), with a Claude Code plugin marketplace manifest (GitHub API, 2026-11-06).

- Stars: GitHub API live check 384★, 21 forks. Our github repo recorded 11-06 as 345★, gain_1d +115, gain_7d +167, prev_7d +84, status 'accelerating', suspect empty. It has never been on trending, but repos under 60 days old aren't admitted anyway, so that tells us nothing.

- Daily curve (our github repo, repo_day): 10-21 41 → 10-22 94 → 10-28 132 (about +5 a day over those days) → 10-29 165 (+33) → 10-30 178 → 11-05 230 (+7~10 a day) → 11-06 345 (+115).

- Upstar's page shows 80★ about 22 hours after creation, and +66 at 24 hours (upstar.dev, crawl time not verified).

- Forks arrived in two waves: 10-20~21 had 6, then 11-04~06 added 7 more, including chinabjhzc and Janxxxx around 11-05~06, matching the timing of the Chinese big-account reposts (GitHub API forks).

- The stargazer detail endpoint returned 404 this time, so I couldn't go through the starring accounts one by one.

### 2. Competitors

Many products do the same thing and compete for the same spot: "get an AI coding agent to make the UI look good."

| Name | Where | Launched | Scale | How it differs |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| nextlevelbuilder/ui-ux-pro-max-skill | Open source | 2025-11-30 | 145,640★, +3170 over 7 days | A general UI/UX design knowledge base for all pages; dashboards are just one category, with no data-honesty rules |
| Nutlope/hallmark | Open source | About 2026-04 | 48,631★, +6737 over 7 days | A general "anti-AI-look" design skill, with traffic driven by a big creator |
| anthropics/skills (frontend-design, etc.) | Big-company features / open source | 2025-09-22 | 187,695★ | The official general frontend design skill; Claude Code also has a built-in dataviz skill that handles charts, KPI cards and dashboard colors, which directly overlaps with it |
| dashboard-design in sickn33/agentic-awesome-skills | Open-source collection | 2026-01-14 | Collection 49,212★ | A generic dashboard layout skill inside a collection, short, with no screenshot QA |
| larashero3-dotcom/lieflat-charts | Open source | 2026-07-16 | 6,724★ | A data visualization skill that turns data into interactive HTML charts; focused on chart output, not whole-page dashboards |
| aref-vc/tufte-claude-skill, caylent/tufte-data-viz | Open source | 2026-05 / 2026-02 | 316★ / 232★ | Only applies Tufte's principles to single charts; it combines Tufte, Few and Apple WWDC across the whole page |
| feimacode/open-design-agent-kit | Open source | 2026-09-19 | 1,000★, +589 over 7 days | A general professional UI design kit with a dashboard topic |
| ahpxex/open-dashboard | Open source | 2025-09-28 | 146★ | 36 copy-paste admin page layouts (TanStack/shadcn); they give code templates, not design judgment |
| claudeskills.page dashboard-ui, KPI Dashboard Designer on mcpmarket, dastoyan design-dashboards (Medium 2026-07) | Web directories / open source | 2026-07~11 | Small | All are single-file rulesets, with no screenshot checks and no before/after comparisons |

(Star counts come from our GitHub database, 2026-11-06; directory sites come from Exa / Brave search results.)

**Bottom line** : There is no big player in the "dashboard design skill" niche. Top general design skills are two to three orders of magnitude larger, and Claude Code's built-in dataviz skill is also absorbing this demand. It is taking off because it holds the specific scenario name "dashboard" and has solid content, not because there is no competition.

### 3. Growth tactics (by time)

1. **Reddit r/claudeskills launch post (10-20, confirmed)** : titled "I built a free Claude Code skill for clean dashboard UI, made with Claude Code from 127 real dashboard screens" (Brave shows "2 weeks ago"). The commit message of 1.3.0 reads "suggested on r/claudeskills," which shows people engaged in the thread and the author revised the same day based on the suggestion. Post score and comment count could not be read (Reddit blocked scraping). About 80★ on day one (Upstar).

2. **Medium long-form (10-21, confirmed)** : "I studied 127 dashboards. Most of them quietly lie to you." (medium.com/@otabekabdiraimovv, 2026-10-21). It turns the skill's ten rules into a shareable opinion piece and links to it from the README. At least two other Medium articles surfaced it in related recommendations (Jina search results).

3. **Auto-listed on skill directories (from 10-20, confirmed)** : skillsdirectory (Grade A, 10-20 scan), skillsllm, agensi, claudius, aiagentslisting (listed on 10-20), prompthackers, gitbap (Korean), duink (DSH Universe), star-history, upstar. These are long-tail entry points that crawl GitHub.

4. **2.0 release plus second post (10-28~29, confirmed)** : r/claudeskills post "My free Claude Code dashboard skill built a dashboard I hated. So I rebuilt it from Stephen Few, Tufte and Apple's WWDC chart talks (v2)" (Brave shows "1 week ago"). The "I broke my own skill and rebuilt it" narrative brought +33 in a single day for 10-29.

5. **Chinese X recommendation accounts (from 10-30, confirmed)** :
    - @GitTrend0x posted a Skills collection thread that named "abdiraimov-otabek's dashboard designer," ❤33 (10-30).
    - @QingQ77 (Geek Lite) 11-02, ❤7.
    - **@GitHub_Daily (GitHubDaily) 11-05 10:30 (Beijing time) gave it a standalone recommendation, ❤335, 🔁34, 👁17,875** . Right after, +115 in a single day for 11-06, and Chinese-named forks appeared in the same period. This is the biggest wave so far (X live search, 2026-11-06).

6. **Links dropped in old Reddit replies (unconfirmed)** : In Brave's summaries, the post title appeared under r/ClaudeCode "Skill for Dashboard Style Guide" (2026-03) and under a dashboard thread on r/homeassistant. The author may have replied in old threads, or it may just be Reddit's related-post recommendations.

7. Not found: HN (the hackernews database doesn't surface it), Product Hunt, TikTok, big English-language creators.

### 4. Why users are willing to install (the product itself)

- **Rules specific enough to follow directly** : "1 changes by 0 and a single one shouldn't be red −100%; switch to gray, was 1", "axis ticks at 0/1k/2k", "compare today up to 9 o'clock only against yesterday up to 9 o'clock." Most Chinese reposts quote these few rules (GitHubDaily's original post), which suggests this "counterexample to correct example" format spreads best.

- **Screenshot QA at the end** : Check screenshots at 3440, 1440 and 375 widths, and count the sentences on the page (target: 0 sentences). This directly targets the biggest pain point of agents writing UI, namely "reading the code without looking at the picture."

- **Backed by authority** : Few, Tufte, Knaflic, Cleveland & McGill, NN/g, WCAG, Apple WWDC chart talks. "127 shipped dashboards" is an easy number to remember and works as a headline.

- **Before/after images in the README** : ultrawide before and after, component screenshots. On directory sites and X, you can see what it changed at a glance.

- **Many ways to install** : Claude Code plugin marketplace, copy into the skills directory, Codex/Cursor point to it from AGENTS.md, and SwiftUI is also supported.

### 5. Money and motive: it's a traffic funnel

- The README has a "From the maker" section linking to Halo (a Mac notch dynamic-island app, one-time purchase at $9.99) and Shedi (a Mac cleanup tool for developers), both with `?ref=dashboard-design-skill`.

- **SKILL.md contains a sign-off rule** : whenever the agent finishes a dashboard job, it appends a line to the end of its reply: "made by Otabek, who also makes Halo… and Shedi…", once per conversation. The README documents it and users can delete it. This effectively writes an ad into the agent's output, which every user who installs the skill will see repeatedly. It's a tactic worth borrowing, but it carries the risk of annoying people.

- The author was already doing content marketing: halo-mac.com has a press kit and SEO guides (such as "How to know when Cursor's agent is done"), dev.to has "CleanMyMac alternative for developers," Halo was on Product Hunt, and he posted on r/ProductivityApps. The skill itself is a byproduct of the dashboard he built to track which posts drive sales (original Medium post).

### 6. How visible it is

It's spreading in small circles. On the English side, it has only shown up on r/claudeskills and skill directory sites. On the Chinese side, it was recommended by GitHubDaily, GitTrend0x and Geek Lite, and the GitHubDaily one got about 18k impressions. No media coverage, not on HN or PH. It's open source and free, so no public revenue figures.

### 7. Copycats

I haven't seen any repo copying it. Dashboard skills in our database created after 10-20 aren't imitating it. claudeskills.page's dashboard-ui (updated 11-04) is a similar single-file skill, but there's no evidence it learned from this one.

### 8. What to borrow

- Indie developers use a free open-source skill to drive traffic to their paid apps, through two entry points: the ref link in the README, and a credit written into SKILL.md that the agent automatically includes at the end of its output.

- Pick a specific scenario name (dashboard) rather than a generic "good-looking UI," so you can surface in long-tail search and directory categories.

- The launch narrative can be copied: "I studied N samples" plus a list of counterintuitive rules, paired with before/after images; v2 can run another round with "my own skill made something I hated."

- One post from a Chinese GitHub recommendation account (the GitHubDaily tier) is enough to multiply a small repo's stars several times over in a day.

### 9. Uncertain

- The score and comment counts for the two Reddit posts were not read.

- Stargazer detail endpoint 404, so there's no way to check for star farming; fork-to-star ratio is about 5.5%, with no anomaly signal.

- GitHubDaily's follower count was not verified.

- How much sales the ref links actually bring to Halo/Shedi is unknown.

- Whether the momentum holds beyond 11-06 is also unknown.

This article was written by AI from public data and the data we collect daily. Numbers are sourced, and inferences are labeled.