Let your coding agent find its own design references

Why agents default to the average. Ask an agent to build a pricing page and it reaches for the average pricing page. It has no picture of a good one to follow unless you hand it one, and most people don't have a URL ready.

find_references closes that gap. It's a tool in plagio's MCP server that searches Discover, 445 hand-made sites and their pricing, about, careers, changelog and other pages, sorted by industry.

What you ask, what comes back

You don't call it yourself. Ask your agent in plain words, and it calls the tool when you haven't named a site:

Redo my pricing page. Find a few good ones from SaaS sites first and show me.

Each reference comes back with the page's URL, a screenshot, the colour roles (background, text, accent) and the fonts in use. The agent shows you the options, or picks the closest, then captures it with capture_component or extract_brand.

Why references, not rules

Telling a model "no purple gradients" moves it to the next most common look. Showing it one real page gives it something specific to follow: a type scale, a spacing rhythm, a palette with roles. That is what plagio captures from the page, measured in a browser.

Set it up

find_references is free and uses no captures. Connect plagio once (see Connectors); the tool is there alongside capture_component, capture_page, extract_brand and extract_motion. plagio is also listed in the official MCP Registry as dev.plagio/plagio.