Designer Skill

Transform natural language application descriptions into production-ready DigitalOcean App Platform specifications.

What This Skill Does

• Converts descriptions like "I need a web app with..." into .do/app.yaml
• Analyzes existing repositories to generate app specs
• Creates Deploy to DigitalOcean button configurations
• Designs multi-component architectures (services, workers, jobs, static sites)

Quick Start

# User says: "I need a Python API with PostgreSQL"
# Skill produces:
.do/
├── app.yaml              # App Platform specification
└── deploy.template.yaml  # Deploy to DO button

Key Decisions This Skill Makes

Decision	Default	Rationale
Instance size	apps-s-1vcpu-1gb	Good starting point
Database	Dev database	Cost-effective for development
Cache	Valkey (not Redis)	Redis is EOL
Build method	Dockerfile if present	More control
Health check	/health or /healthz	Industry standard
Region	nyc	Good default

Files

• SKILL.md — Complete skill documentation with workflows
• reference/component-types.md — Services, workers, jobs, static sites
• reference/architecture-patterns.md — 5 complete architecture patterns
• reference/environment-variables.md — Scopes, types, placeholders
• reference/deploy-to-do-button.md — Button setup and templates
• reference/database-configuration.md — Dev vs managed databases

Integration

Direction	Skill	Integration
→	deployment	Deploy the generated app spec
→	devcontainers	Create local dev environment
→	postgres	Advanced database configuration
→	networking	Custom domains, CORS, VPC
←	migration	Converts from other platforms

Related Skills

• deployment — Ship the app spec to production
• planner — Generate staged deployment plans
• postgres — Configure database permissions