Recommended rules for DESIGN.md file discovery in registry

[necatiozmen]

Hi @davideast

Following up on the earlier discussion #63 about whether a project should have one DESIGN.md file or multiple scoped DESIGN.md files..

We are working on designmd.sh, which we plan to launch today. It is a public registry and discovery layer for DESIGN.md files. For the registry, we need a practical starting point for finding DESIGN.md files in public GitHub repositories.

Since the spec does not currently define preferred file locations, we started with a small set of supported paths:

DESIGN.md (repo root)
docs/DESIGN.md
.agents/DESIGN.md
.cursor/DESIGN.md
.claude/DESIGN.md
design-system/DESIGN.md
design/DESIGN.md
design-md/DESIGN.md
website/DESIGN.md

And these nested collection-style paths:

design-md/<name>/DESIGN.md
designs/<name>/DESIGN.md
skills/<name>/DESIGN.md
.agents/skills/<name>/DESIGN.md
.claude/skills/<name>/DESIGN.md
.cursor/skills/<name>/DESIGN.md

We are currently using Google's DESIGN.md spec as the validation baseline. If a file follows the spec, we treat it as valid and show token previews in the registry. If it does not pass validation, we show the validation result.

Questions:
Do these locations seem reasonable for tools and registries?
What other locations should we consider and avoid?

Would love feedback from the Stitch team and the community