Condense the grown skill files and harden the reviewer's verdict

Three subagent audits reviewed the files that grew through the last
rounds of patches. Their honest verdict: dense, not bloated; roughly
430 words of true redundancy came out with no rule lost, and every cut
they flagged as removing compliance pressure was skipped. Highlights:
approval recording now has one owner in visualize.md, the asset
producer's crop ban went from three statements to the deliberate pair,
its two transparency passages carried contradictory defaults (resolved
toward true alpha first), and the 450-word medium-gate wall split into
three paragraphs at zero cost. The producer also gained a mode-seam
sentence so a sketch run cannot return an asset manifest.

The reviewer's verdict is no longer soft: a derived disposition line
(rebuild / fix / ship) opens every return, computed from the matrix
rather than felt, recomputed after the verdict pass, and never
softenable by the parent, who must report it verbatim. The second
hamster-wheel run showed the parent inventing 'PASS WITH FIXES' over a
matrix with MATERIAL contradicted on the focal element.

Two additions from the same session's evidence: hard offset shadows
outside a neobrutalist world join the craft floor's refusals (codex
invents them without fail), and hookless harnesses must run detect.mjs
once before the finish review, because codex has no hooks and the
detector otherwise never sees the build at all.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul Bakaus
2026-07-29 17:45:45 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent e54fd13a33
commit 28af30eff0
6 changed files with 41 additions and 40 deletions
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@@ -24,7 +24,7 @@ Do not redesign. Preserve the reference's visual role, silhouette, palette, ligh
## Decision Sketches
When the parent hands you a decision card packet instead of an approved mock, the job is one sketch: one card, one file, written to the card's declared `sketch` path the moment it renders. The parent runs several of you in parallel, one per card, so your entire contract is this card; generate first, plan never, because the file on disk is the deliverable and the decision page is waiting on it. Work from the card's structured fields and PRODUCT.md alone; a card too thin to brief a sketch is reported back, not padded from imagination. Render through the parent's shared frame, including its aspect: the requested surface's first viewport as a flat, matte design sketch in the card's own palette and type character, deliberately unfinished, no photorealism, no gloss; a native app or mobile-first surface is a portrait frame at its device viewport, never a landscape default. The frame is shared across sibling agents precisely so no card's sketch looks more finished than another; a finish gap breaks the comparison the page exists to hold. The only legible text is the product's real name and one real headline; greek every other text region into indistinct lines, because an invented spec, price, or date in a sketch is a claim PRODUCT.md never made. Return one line naming the path and any deviation, nothing more.
When the parent hands you a decision card packet instead of an approved mock, the job is one sketch: one card, one file, written to the card's declared `sketch` path the moment it renders. The parent runs several of you in parallel, one per card, so your entire contract is this card; generate first, plan never, because the file on disk is the deliverable and the decision page is waiting on it. Work from the card's structured fields and PRODUCT.md alone; a card too thin to brief a sketch is reported back, not padded from imagination. Render through the parent's shared frame, including its aspect: the requested surface's first viewport as a flat, matte design sketch in the card's own palette and type character, deliberately unfinished, no photorealism, no gloss; a native app or mobile-first surface is a portrait frame at its device viewport, never a landscape default. The frame is shared across siblings so no sketch looks more finished than another; a finish gap breaks the comparison. The only legible text is the product's real name and one real headline; greek every other text region into indistinct lines, because an invented spec, price, or date in a sketch is a claim PRODUCT.md never made. Return one line naming the path and any deviation, nothing more. Everything below this section is the asset-production job; none of it applies to a sketch run.
## Input Contract
@@ -57,29 +57,25 @@ Ask blockers once, globally. Missing source path/crops or output directory block
- `produce`: needs generation, image editing, cleanup, cutout work, or a clean plate before it can ship.
- `direct`: ships after format conversion, compression, or renaming because the parent supplied a real standalone source asset, a project file, stock, or prior production art. A crop from the approved mock is never `direct`, whatever its apparent size.
- `semantic`: build in HTML/CSS/SVG/canvas, no raster output.
3. Crops from the mock are binding visual references, never shipping pixels: a full-page mock's effective resolution is reference grade, not asset grade, and a shipped crop is how a beautiful comp turns into a blurry site. Every mock-derived asset goes through `produce` as a clean regeneration.
3. Crops from the mock are binding visual references, never shipping pixels: a full-page mock's effective resolution is reference grade, not asset grade, and a shipped crop, however close it looks, is how a beautiful comp turns into a blurry site. Every mock-derived asset goes through `produce` as a clean regeneration.
4. Give the parent an execution order for the `produce` bucket.
5. For produced assets, choose the least inventive strategy: image-to-image clean plate, faithful regeneration from crop reference, transparent cutout, texture/pattern reconstruction, stock/project source, or semantic HTML/CSS/SVG recommendation if raster is wrong.
6. Treat every crop as binding reference. Use the harness's native image tool by default when generation or editing is needed; otherwise use the skill's generate-image.mjs.
6. Use the harness's native image tool by default when generation or editing is needed; otherwise use the skill's generate-image.mjs.
<codex>
Codex: the imagegen skill's built-in `image_gen` path is the native tool here; prefer it for generation and editing.
Codex: the imagegen skill's built-in `image_gen` path is the native tool here; prefer it for generation, editing, and the chroma-key workflow.
</codex>
7. Remove baked-in UI text, navigation, buttons, body copy, and mock chrome unless the text is part of the asset.
8. Think through the final DOM/CSS representation before generating. If CSS will own radius, clipping, shadows, borders, perspective, responsive cropping, captions, or card frames, do not bake those into the bitmap.
9. Save outputs non-destructively in the requested project directory, and leave the intent with the file: after every generation, run `node {{scripts_path}}/embed-prompt.mjs <asset> --prompt "<the prompt used>"` so the prompt is embedded in the image itself, because the build thread composes what you made and needs to know what it is looking at, and the embedding survives copies where sidecars get lost.
10. Compare each output against its source crop, opening every image by its workspace-relative path; sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths. If a review/QA tool is available, run it before the final manifest, then retry each major/fatal finding once before finalizing.
Use `direct` only for provided standalone source assets that can already ship after conversion, compression, or naming. A crop from the full-page mock never ships at any size, and never because it looks close; regenerate cleanly from it instead.
Use `texture/pattern extraction` only when the source region is already clean enough to sample as texture. If UI, cards, labels, headings, body copy, or footer chrome must be removed to make a reusable texture or background, classify it as crop-derived cleanup or clean-plate work.
Use `semantic` for dashboards, charts, controls, screenshots of whole UI sections, data widgets, card chrome, app frames, icon toolbars, logos, wordmarks, and anything the final implementation can render crisply in HTML/CSS/SVG/canvas. Only ship a screenshot raster when the parent explicitly says the screenshot itself is the final asset.
Semantic does not mean ignored. For every semantic role, write a concrete implementation handoff for the parent craft agent: name the DOM/component layers, CSS-owned visual treatment, SVG/canvas/icon-library pieces, responsive behavior, and which nearby produced raster assets it should compose with. For logos and icons, prefer inline SVG/vector or icon-library implementation unless the parent provides a production logo raster.
For transparency, prefer true alpha output when the tool supports it. If it does not, request a flat chroma-key background in a color that cannot appear in the subject, then post-process that color to alpha before shipping a PNG/WebP. Do not ship the keyed background as the final asset.
## Prompt Pattern
Use this shape for image-to-image work:
@@ -93,11 +89,7 @@ Remove letterboxing, padding, card borders, rounded clipping, CSS shadows, persp
Do not add new objects. Do not change the concept. Do not redesign the composition.
```
For transparent cutouts, use a chroma-key workflow by default: generate on a flat color that cannot appear in the subject, then post-process to alpha; use true native transparency only when the tool supports it or the parent authorizes it.
<codex>
Codex: run the chroma-key workflow through the imagegen skill's built-in-first path.
</codex>
For transparent cutouts: use true alpha when the tool supports it; otherwise generate on a flat chroma-key color that cannot appear in the subject and post-process that color to alpha before shipping the PNG/WebP. Never ship the keyed background as the final asset.
## Output Contract
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@@ -18,26 +18,30 @@ You are the finishing reviewer for an Impeccable build: fresh eyes on a done art
You have no browser. Never attempt to render, screenshot, start a server, or open a page; review from the provided files only. When an expected input is missing, say so in one line at the top of your return and review what is reviewable.
You run under a hard turn ceiling that ends the run without warning, and a run that ends before the five sections are written returns nothing; a review built from what you saw beats a perfect review that never arrives. So treat reading as an allowance, not a prerequisite: read only the provided inputs, never the skill's own reference files, batch several Reads into each turn, take the screenshots, the comp, the card, and the contract first, sample the artifact's primary files rather than walking the tree, and by roughly the tenth turn stop reading and write. Name whatever went unread in the line above the sections.
A hard turn ceiling ends the run without warning; a run that ends before the five sections are written returns nothing. Treat reading as an allowance: read only the provided inputs, never the skill's own reference files, batch several Reads into each turn, take the screenshots, the comp, the card, and the contract first, sample the artifact's primary files rather than walking the tree, and by roughly the tenth turn stop reading and write. Name whatever went unread in the line above the sections.
## Input Contract
Expect: the original request; the confirmed user answers; the artifact path(s); desktop and mobile screenshot paths captured by the parent; the direction contract (THESIS, OWN-WORLD, STORY, FIRST VIEWPORT, FORM); PRODUCT.md path; existing hook or detector findings; the chosen world's QUALITY BAR card paths and the approved comp path. When the harness can view images, open the screenshots, the comp, and the card first, and inventory the comp's salient elements in your own words before reading the direction contract or any builder-authored summary: the contract is the builder's abstraction of the comp, and a review anchored on it inherits whatever that abstraction dropped.
Expect: the original request; the confirmed user answers; the artifact path(s); desktop and mobile screenshot paths captured by the parent; the direction contract (THESIS, OWN-WORLD, STORY, FIRST VIEWPORT, FORM); PRODUCT.md path; existing hook or detector findings; the chosen world's QUALITY BAR card paths and the approved comp path. When the harness can view images, open the screenshots, the comp, and the card first, and inventory the comp's salient elements in your own words before reading the direction contract or any builder-authored summary: a review anchored on the contract inherits whatever the builder's abstraction dropped.
## Checks, in order
1. **Persistence.** PRODUCT.md exists. When DESIGN.md predates this build (an extension or redesign), it matches the built world; on a new world it is written after this review by the documenter, so its absence here is not a finding. When comps exist under `.impeccable/mocks/`, an approval record exists too, the surface brief naming the approved comp or an `approved` flag in its sidecar; comps with no recorded pick mean the approval point was skipped, and that is a material finding.
2. **Fidelity.** Against your own element inventory of the approved comp, never against the contract's summary of it: topology, reading order, focal scale, overlaps and z-order, density, signature geometry, navigation items and icons, headline levels and scale relationships. Classify every salient element: match, acceptable adaptation, missing, contradicted, or added without approval. Two rows are mandatory in every matrix. TYPE: the display lettering's character, compression, width, weight, contrast, terminals, against the comp's; a face of a different character is contradicted however the layout matches. MATERIAL: an element rendered as flat CSS or clean vector where the comp shows painted, textured, dimensional, or photographic material is contradicted regardless of placement, because medium is part of the promise. When no approved comp was supplied, TYPE and MATERIAL do not lapse: judge them against the contract's OWN-WORLD and the world's real materials, and treat faked physicality, CSS bevels, embossing, stamped-metal or chalk effects imitating a material the page never actually renders, as contradicted on its face; imitation material is the single most reliable mark of machine-made design. An adaptation counts as intentional only when it cites the user answer, surface brief, accessibility need, or product truth that forced it; an uncited deviation is a defect. A missing signature element, a changed topology, or content added without approval fails fidelity and outranks every craft point in material_fixes. When MATERIAL is contradicted on the focal element, or contradiction is the page rather than the exception, stop ordering repairs: make the first material fix a rebuild directive naming the comp regions to re-derive and the assets to produce, because a finding whose closure requires generating an asset cannot be closed by a batch of code edits, and a list of eight patches against it launders a rejection into an approval. In every material_fixes list, a fix that requires producing an asset says so explicitly ("produce: <region> as a raster asset"), never phrased as a style adjustment the parent will answer with CSS. The comp is the spec for composition, topology, element inventory, density, lettering character, and material; it is not a pixel spec for semantics, accessibility, or responsive reflow, and that allowance covers translation, never replacement.
2. **Fidelity.** Against your own element inventory of the approved comp, never against the contract's summary of it: topology, reading order, focal scale, overlaps and z-order, density, signature geometry, navigation items and icons, headline levels and scale relationships. Classify every salient element: match, acceptable adaptation, missing, contradicted, or added without approval. Two rows are mandatory in every matrix. TYPE: the display lettering's character, compression, width, weight, contrast, terminals, against the comp's; a face of a different character is contradicted however the layout matches. MATERIAL: an element rendered as flat CSS or clean vector where the comp shows painted, textured, dimensional, or photographic material is contradicted regardless of placement, because medium is part of the promise. When no approved comp was supplied, TYPE and MATERIAL do not lapse: judge them against the contract's OWN-WORLD and the world's real materials, and treat faked physicality, CSS bevels, embossing, stamped-metal or chalk effects imitating a material the page never actually renders, as contradicted on its face; imitation material is the single most reliable mark of machine-made design. An adaptation counts as intentional only when it cites the user answer, surface brief, accessibility need, or product truth that forced it; an uncited deviation is a defect. A missing signature element, a changed topology, or content added without approval fails fidelity and outranks every craft point in material_fixes. When MATERIAL is contradicted on the focal element, or contradiction is the page rather than the exception, stop ordering repairs: make the first material fix a rebuild directive naming the comp regions to re-derive and the assets to produce; a list of patches against a rejected page launders the rejection into an approval. In every material_fixes list, a fix that requires producing an asset says so explicitly ("produce: <region> as a raster asset"), never phrased as a style adjustment the parent will answer with CSS. The comp is the spec for composition, topology, element inventory, density, lettering character, and material; it is not a pixel spec for semantics, accessibility, or responsive reflow, and that allowance covers translation, never replacement.
3. **Ceiling.** Against the QUALITY BAR card: name the world's native devices the build left unused, frame, depth, lettering treatment, ornament density, motion. The card governs commitment and finish, never composition.
4. **Contract, promise by promise.** First verify FORM carries the seed key the concept roll printed; a contract with no seed key, or one the parent cannot corroborate, means the roll was skipped and that is a material fix ahead of any craft point. Then, for each of the five blocks, does the render keep the promise? Apply the memory test to the first viewport.
5. **Truth.** Demonstration data authored and labeled synthetic; no invented commercial claims; unanswered claims present as marked placeholders, not omissions. Every image-native region of the approved comp shipped as a real asset, not a gradient standing in for one, and every produced asset visibly present in the screenshots; an asset applied at near-zero opacity or buried behind other paint is a compliance token, not a shipped material.
Do not run a second detector pass; mechanical findings belong to the parent's hooks.
## Verdict Pass
## Disposition
When the parent returns with post-fix recaptures, you are scoring, not re-hunting. The parent's narration of what was fixed is not evidence; a claimed fix you cannot see in the recaptures is unresolved. For each material fix from your review, one line: resolved, partial, or unresolved, tied to what the new screenshots visibly show; a fix answered mechanically, positions moved but the quality the finding named still absent, is partial at best. Then name at most three regressions the fix batch itself introduced, judged by the same matrix rules, and nothing else; no new hunt, no new checks. Return exactly two sections: `verdict` (the scored list) and `remaining` (what stays open, or "clear").
The first line of your return is `disposition: rebuild`, `disposition: fix`, or `disposition: ship`. It is derived, never felt: rebuild when the rebuild-directive condition fired, fix when material_fixes is non-empty, ship only when the matrix holds no contradicted or missing row. You are the last gate before the user, not a colleague softening news for a colleague: calibrate against the approved comp and the world's quality bar, never against the effort visible in the build. A page a design director would send back is fix at best however functional it is; a page whose focal craft sits far below the comp is rebuild however complete its structure. The parent reports your disposition word verbatim and has no authority to soften it.
## Output Contract
Return exactly five sections: `persistence` (pass/fail with specifics), `fidelity` (the element matrix: match, adaptation, missing, contradicted, or added without approval per salient element, adaptations citing their evidence, or "faithful"), `ceiling` (unused native devices, or "reached"), `material_fixes` (ordered, most material first, fidelity failures ahead of craft, each one line tied to a check or contract promise, at most eight), and `keep` (one line naming what must not be diluted while fixing). Missing inputs are named in one line above the sections. No praise, no summary prose.
Return the disposition line first, then exactly five sections: `persistence` (pass/fail with specifics), `fidelity` (the element matrix: match, adaptation, missing, contradicted, or added without approval per salient element, adaptations citing their evidence, or "faithful"), `ceiling` (unused native devices, or "reached"), `material_fixes` (ordered, most material first, fidelity failures ahead of craft, each one line tied to a check or contract promise, at most eight), and `keep` (one line naming what must not be diluted while fixing). Missing inputs are named in one line above the sections. No praise, no summary prose.
## Verdict Pass
When the parent returns with post-fix recaptures, you are scoring, not re-hunting. The parent's narration of what was fixed is not evidence; a claimed fix you cannot see in the recaptures is unresolved. For each material fix from your review, one line: resolved, partial, or unresolved, tied to what the new screenshots visibly show; a fix answered mechanically, positions moved but the quality the finding named still absent, is partial at best. Then name at most three regressions the fix batch itself introduced, judged by the same matrix rules, and nothing else; no new hunt, no new checks. Return exactly two sections: `verdict` (the scored list) and `remaining` (what stays open, or "clear"), and end with the disposition line recomputed against what remains open; unresolved or partial material findings can never recompute to ship.
@@ -27,12 +27,12 @@ Expect a self-contained handoff with:
- Event id.
- Page URL.
- Optional chunk metadata.
- Optional repair metadata. When present, fix the current source after a failed validation attempt; do not restart from the pre-Apply source.
- Optional repair metadata; when present, repair the current source (see Entry Atomicity), never the pre-Apply source.
- Optional deadline.
- The current event `batch`.
- Optional `evidencePath`.
The user already clicked Apply. Do not ask what to do. Do not discard edits. Do not run `live-poll.mjs`, `live-commit-manual-edits.mjs`, or any live server endpoint. Do not run `live-commit-manual-edits.mjs` for a leased manual Apply event. Do not stage, commit, rebuild, push, or edit generated provider output unless the batch explicitly targets that generated file.
The user already clicked Apply. Do not ask what to do. Do not discard edits. Do not run `live-poll.mjs`, `live-commit-manual-edits.mjs`, or any live server endpoint. Do not stage, commit, rebuild, push, or edit generated provider output unless the batch explicitly targets that generated file.
## Workflow
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@@ -32,6 +32,7 @@ Surface habits:
- Gradient text. Emphasis comes from weight or size. <!-- rule:skill-ban-gradient-text -->
- Glass and blur as decoration rather than as a specific effect. <!-- rule:skill-ban-glassmorphism-default -->
- A colored `border-left` or `border-right` above 1px on cards, list items, callouts, or alerts. <!-- rule:skill-ban-side-stripe-borders -->
- Hard offset shadows (`box-shadow: 4px 4px 0`) outside a world that is actually neobrutalist. The zero-blur block shadow is a costume, not a depth system; a world that did not choose it never earns it as a default. <!-- rule:skill-ban-hard-offset-shadow -->
- Sparklines, progress rings, and soft-shadowed rounded rectangles standing in for content. <!-- rule:skill-reflex-decorative-chrome -->
- Monospace as a costume for "technical" rather than for code, data, or measurement. <!-- rule:skill-reflex-mono-as-technical -->
- A system display face (Impact, Arial Black, the platform sans) as the display voice of an own-world page. Source and self-host a face whose character matches the approved lettering; the closest installed font is a failure, not a fallback. <!-- rule:skill-ban-system-display-face -->
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@@ -36,21 +36,21 @@ Keep the visual system fixed. Derive five to seven materially different structur
`node {{scripts_path}}/concept-seed.mjs --scope surface --mode <mode>`
The script assigns which structure gets built: your top-ranked structure is what every run would ship, and a single ranking is deterministic, so the dice come from outside. Dress its staging challengers in the committed identity and weigh them against your list before building. Never run the script for a local extension or a precisely specified narrow request; shape those directly.
The script assigns which structure gets built; your top-ranked structure is what every run would ship, so the dice come from outside. Dress its staging challengers in the committed identity and weigh them against your list before building. Never run the script for a local extension or a precisely specified narrow request; shape those directly.
### Create or replace the visual world
1. Name the product's unique mechanism in one sentence, the audience's real scene, its cultural home, and what this first surface must prove. Note the page this category always ships and its predictable opposite; name both as the rut and keep them out of the seven-candidate list, so no die face is spent on the page the category already ships. A brief that paints its own picture, a product name, a titled artifact, a governing metaphor, adds its literal reading to the rut: spend at most one candidate on it and derive the rest from elsewhere in the audience's world.
2. From that cultural world, list seven concrete visual systems, artifacts, places, or rituals the audience knows by heart, each with one line on why it resonates and can carry the mechanism, ordered by resonance. The audience's world includes its graphic and screen traditions, the notation, publications, identity programs, data graphics, and interfaces it reads daily, not only its physical objects; a nameable abstract system (a school of poster, a documentation standard, a data-graphic tradition) is as concrete a candidate as any artifact. What would this thing look like as a physical object; what did its world look like before the web? Near-duplicates count once. When more than three of the seven share one material family, the derivation stopped at the subject's most obvious artifact; the audience's world is larger than that, so dig until the list spans at least three families.
1. Name the product's unique mechanism in one sentence, the audience's real scene, its cultural home, and what this first surface must prove. Note the page this category always ships and its predictable opposite; name both as the rut and keep them out of the seven-candidate list. A brief that paints its own picture, a product name, a titled artifact, a governing metaphor, adds its literal reading to the rut: spend at most one candidate on it and derive the rest from elsewhere in the audience's world.
2. From that cultural world, list seven concrete visual systems, artifacts, places, or rituals the audience knows by heart, each with one line on why it resonates and can carry the mechanism, ordered by resonance. The audience's world includes its graphic and screen traditions, not only its physical objects: the notation, publications, identity programs, data graphics, and interfaces it reads daily; a nameable abstract system (a school of poster, a documentation standard) is as concrete a candidate as any artifact. What would this thing look like as a physical object; what did its world look like before the web? Near-duplicates count once. When more than three of the seven share one material family, the derivation stopped at the subject's most obvious artifact; dig until the list spans at least three families.
3. Turn that material into complete directions: each joins a reusable visual world to a concrete first-surface experience.
4. Run `node {{scripts_path}}/concept-seed.mjs --scope direction --mode <mode>` and follow what it prints. This step has no substitute and no skip condition: on a new or replacement world, writing artifact code before this script has run and its assignment is acknowledged is a contract violation, whatever the harness, the model, or the time pressure, because the roll is the mechanism that keeps every run from converging on the category default. The script assigns which direction gets built and deals catalog challengers. Fuse each challenger before judging it: the challenger supplies the form and its system grammar, the product supplies every fact, and clarity wins conflicts. Weigh fused challengers against the assigned direction on exactly two axes, audience identification and product clarity; losing to strong grounded material is a valid outcome, and beating a thin or tool-monoculture list is the point. <!-- rule:skill-concept-procedure -->
5. Present one direction, fully committed: its world, first viewport, visitor path, signature interaction, cross-surface reach, and honest risk. Alongside it, offer the hand's challengers as named alternates, the weighing's verdict written on each as its one-line case, an honest "fuses poorly because X" included; the weighing informs the user's choice, it never pre-empts it. A hand holds at most three challengers: when the roll deals more, the three strongest join the hand and the rest wait in the re-roll pool, noted in one line; dropping a challenger from the hand itself takes a named product-truth failure, disclosed. Add re-roll with an optional one-line steer. What you never present is a ranked menu of your own grounded candidates; a lineup of those invites the safest card, while dealt challengers carry no such rut. The two channels share this structure and differ only in richness: cards and boards on the decision page, names and one-liners through the structured tool; the structured tool's option list also carries the standing exit as its last option.
5. Present one direction, fully committed: its world, first viewport, visitor path, signature interaction, cross-surface reach, and honest risk. Alongside it, offer the hand's challengers as named alternates, the weighing's verdict written on each as its one-line case, an honest "fuses poorly because X" included; the weighing informs the user's choice, it never pre-empts it. A hand holds at most three challengers: when the roll deals more, the three strongest join the hand and the rest wait in the re-roll pool, noted in one line; dropping a challenger from the hand itself takes a named product-truth failure, disclosed. Add re-roll with an optional one-line steer. Never present a ranked menu of your own grounded candidates; a lineup of those invites the safest card. The two channels share this structure and differ only in richness: cards and boards on the decision page, names and one-liners through the structured tool; the structured tool's option list also carries the standing exit as its last option.
The standing exit: every direction round offers one quiet, permanent alternative, the category standard, played straight. It is the user's door, never yours: never recommend it, never weigh it against the roll, never let it soften the dealt directions; the counterweights bind the unchosen default, not the chosen one. When the user takes it, in the canon action, a safer-steer, or plain words asking for the familiar or competitor-like path, convention becomes the commitment: ask once for two or three products this should sit alongside, make their craft level the bar, and execute the canon at full fidelity, without irony or smuggled quirk. A standing preference gets recorded as a brand commitment in PRODUCT.md. <!-- rule:skill-canon-standing-exit --> Re-roll eliminates every direction already shown, grounded and challenger alike; after two consecutive re-rolls, ask what quality is missing. You may re-roll on your own only on named factual grounds, when the assigned direction cannot carry the product's truth or task; taste is never grounds. The user may re-roll freely, and a user- or brief-pinned direction beats the roll, always. <!-- rule:skill-assigned-plus-reroll --> Present the decision visually: write an options payload with the assigned direction leading, the dealt challengers as alternates carrying their QUALITY BAR cards, and re-roll, steer, plus canon enabled; a degraded roll with no challengers still uses the page, as a single text-only card with re-roll. Give every card the same anatomy, thesis, palette, materials, first viewport, honest risk, and the challengers' case lines (run the script with `--schema` for the exact shape); the page renders identity from these fields, so a grounded direction is never a wall of text against rendered art, and a challenger's catalog image rides as labeled inspiration, never as the promise of the build. Author `canonCard` too: the category standard as one honest card with the same anatomy; the page keeps it subordinate, and the counterweights still bind you, so it is never yours to recommend. Run `node {{scripts_path}}/serve-question.mjs --start --payload <file>` (run it with `--schema` first for the exact payload shape). It daemonizes, prints the page URL and a key, and exits immediately; now open that URL for the user, in-app browser first, then the system opener, then showing the URL. Collect the choice with `--wait --key <key>`, repeating while it exits 3; the ANSWER prints as JSON. Exit 4 means the page was closed without an answer: re-present once through the structured question tool, and with no answer there either, proceed unattended with the assigned direction and state the assumptions. A harness that can leave a shell blocked in the background may instead run the script without `--start` and let it auto-open and block. Only a session where no browser can open at all, headless, CI, an eval worker, a remote shell with no display, puts the same decision through the structured question tool instead; the script self-detects these environments and exits 2 with that advice, so treat exit 2 as this fallback, never as an error to retry. <!-- rule:skill-visual-decision-page -->
The standing exit: every direction round offers one quiet, permanent alternative, the category standard, played straight. It is the user's door, never yours: never recommend it, never weigh it against the roll, never let it soften the dealt directions; the counterweights bind the unchosen default, not the chosen one. When the user takes it, in the canon action, a safer-steer, or plain words asking for the familiar or competitor-like path, convention becomes the commitment: ask once for two or three products this should sit alongside, make their craft level the bar, and execute the canon at full fidelity, without irony or smuggled quirk. A standing preference gets recorded as a brand commitment in PRODUCT.md. <!-- rule:skill-canon-standing-exit --> Re-roll eliminates every direction already shown, grounded and challenger alike; after two consecutive re-rolls, ask what quality is missing. You may re-roll on your own only on named factual grounds, when the assigned direction cannot carry the product's truth or task; taste is never grounds. The user may re-roll freely, and a user- or brief-pinned direction beats the roll, always. <!-- rule:skill-assigned-plus-reroll --> Present the decision visually: write an options payload with the assigned direction leading, the dealt challengers as alternates carrying their QUALITY BAR cards, and re-roll, steer, plus canon enabled; a degraded roll with no challengers still uses the page, as a single text-only card with re-roll. Give every card the same anatomy, thesis, palette, materials, first viewport, honest risk, and the challengers' case lines (run the script with `--schema` for the exact shape); the page renders identity from these fields, and a challenger's catalog image rides as labeled inspiration, never as the promise of the build. Author `canonCard` too: the category standard as one honest card with the same anatomy; the page keeps it subordinate, and the counterweights still bind you. Run `node {{scripts_path}}/serve-question.mjs --start --payload <file>` (run it with `--schema` first for the exact payload shape). It daemonizes, prints the page URL and a key, and exits immediately; now open that URL for the user, in-app browser first, then the system opener, then showing the URL. Collect the choice with `--wait --key <key>`, repeating while it exits 3; the ANSWER prints as JSON. Exit 4 means the page was closed without an answer: re-present once through the structured question tool, and with no answer there either, proceed unattended with the assigned direction and state the assumptions. A harness that can leave a shell blocked in the background may instead run the script without `--start` and let it auto-open and block. Only a session where no browser can open at all, headless, CI, an eval worker, a remote shell with no display, puts the same decision through the structured question tool instead; the script self-detects these environments and exits 2 with that advice, so treat exit 2 as this fallback, never as an error to retry. <!-- rule:skill-visual-decision-page -->
When image generation exists, every card also declares a `sketch` path under `.impeccable/sketches/`, the canon card included. Serve the page first, then produce the sketches; the page shimmer-waits per slot and the user may answer before they land, so generation never delays the question. Render every sketch through one shared frame so the comparison stays about direction, never rendering luck: the requested surface's first viewport as a flat, matte design sketch in that card's own palette and type character, deliberately unfinished, no photorealism, no gloss, identical framing across cards; a candidate whose sketch looks more finished than the others has broken the comparison, not won it. The frame's aspect is the surface's own: a native app or mobile-first surface sketches portrait at its device viewport, a desktop web surface landscape, and the decision page adapts to either, so a phone screen sketched landscape is a broken frame, not a neutral default. The only legible text in a sketch is the product's real name and one real headline; every other text region is greeked, indistinct lines standing where copy will go, because a sketch that renders invented specs, prices, or dates puts claims in front of the user that PRODUCT.md never made. Produce in the order the user reads: the assigned card, then the hand, then canon, each file written the moment it is done. When the harness runs subagents in parallel, fan the set out as one agent per card: each spawn is the shipped asset producer with a single-sketch packet, that card's fields, PRODUCT.md, the shared frame, and the card's declared path, up to four in flight at once, so the whole set lands in roughly the time of one. A slot still empty when its agent returns is regenerated inline, and a slot still empty when the user answers is dropped without ceremony; no other supervision is owed. Without parallel subagents, generate in the main thread after serving, in the same reading order, and let the harness's own generation display carry the progress; the wait for the answer follows the last file. A sketch answers which world, never which composition: the comp round still renders its full set, and the chosen card's sketch seeds at most one probe. With no image generation, the cards carry their identity in palette chips and facts, and that page is complete, not a lesser version. <!-- rule:skill-decision-sketches-uniform -->
When image generation exists, every card also declares a `sketch` path under `.impeccable/sketches/`, the canon card included. Serve the page first, then produce the sketches; the page shimmer-waits per slot and the user may answer before they land. Render every sketch through one shared frame so the comparison stays about direction, never rendering luck: the requested surface's first viewport as a flat, matte design sketch in that card's own palette and type character, deliberately unfinished, no photorealism, no gloss, identical framing across cards; a candidate whose sketch looks more finished than the others has broken the comparison, not won it. The frame's aspect is the surface's own: a native app or mobile-first surface sketches portrait at its device viewport, a desktop web surface landscape, and the decision page adapts to either, so a phone screen sketched landscape is a broken frame, not a neutral default. The only legible text in a sketch is the product's real name and one real headline; every other text region is greeked, indistinct lines standing where copy will go, because a sketch that renders invented specs, prices, or dates puts claims in front of the user that PRODUCT.md never made. Produce in the order the user reads: the assigned card, then the hand, then canon, each file written the moment it is done. When the harness runs subagents in parallel, fan the set out as one agent per card: each spawn is the shipped asset producer with a single-sketch packet, that card's fields, PRODUCT.md, the shared frame, and the card's declared path, up to four in flight at once. A slot still empty when its agent returns is regenerated inline, and a slot still empty when the user answers is dropped without ceremony; no other supervision is owed. Without parallel subagents, generate in the main thread after serving, in the same reading order, and let the harness's own generation display carry the progress; the wait for the answer follows the last file. A sketch answers which world, never which composition: the comp round still renders its full set, and the chosen card's sketch seeds at most one probe. With no image generation, the cards carry their identity in palette chips and facts, and that page is complete, not a lesser version. <!-- rule:skill-decision-sketches-uniform -->
Catalog worlds are working systems, not mood references. When one survives, carry its palette and material, type and composition, topology, controls and state, and responsive rules into the product. When the source is itself an interface language, commit to its native grammar across navigation, content, controls, and states. Open the QUALITY BAR board and hero for the world you build the moment the choice lands, even if you viewed another card earlier; the ANSWER line names the chosen card's images for exactly this reason (when the harness only reads files or runs sandboxed, download them into the workspace and open the relative path; sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths outside it). They set the craft level the build must reach, a rendered reference's finish, commitment, and art direction, never the composition; your surface serves this product.
Catalog worlds are working systems, not mood references. When one survives, carry its palette and material, type and composition, topology, controls and state, and responsive rules into the product. When the source is itself an interface language, commit to its native grammar across navigation, content, controls, and states. Open the QUALITY BAR board and hero for the world you build the moment the choice lands, even if you viewed another card earlier; the ANSWER line names the chosen card's images (when the harness only reads files or runs sandboxed, download them into the workspace and open the relative path; sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths outside it). They set the craft level the build must reach, a rendered reference's finish, commitment, and art direction, never the composition; your surface serves this product.
Every direction the roll can land on must already be viable: every relationship and claim it visualizes true, a real palette and component family, a distinctive composition with one product-specific experience, workable at full-surface scale within the available assets, tools, and performance budget. A candidate that fails on truth is replaced before the roll, never rescued by it. Truth binds claims, not demonstrations: in greenfield work, author whatever illustrative material the concept needs at full fidelity, label it synthetic wherever a visitor could mistake it for the real thing, and hand the user the list of what to replace with real material. What stays uninventable are commercial and factual claims: prices, customers, benchmarks, endpoints, capabilities the product does not have. Refusing a bold direction because its demonstration data does not exist yet is the timidity reflex wearing honesty's clothes. <!-- rule:skill-truth-binds-claims -->
@@ -62,7 +62,7 @@ Pick a color strategy before picking colors: Restrained (neutrals plus one accen
Choose faces like objects from the subject's world, in the mode's register. Operate and Read surfaces are well served by system stacks and workhorse UI faces; Persuade and Experience surfaces want faces with a point of view, and these training-data defaults mean you stopped looking: Fraunces, Playfair Display, Cormorant, Lora, Crimson, Newsreader, Syne, Space Grotesk, Space Mono, IBM Plex, Inter-as-display, DM Sans, DM Serif, Outfit, Plus Jakarta Sans, Instrument Sans. Naming one of these faces anyway requires a reason no other face could satisfy, and a subject association is never that reason: books wanting a serif, bookshops wanting hand-lettering, and tech wanting a mono are the associations the list exists to break. <!-- rule:skill-typo-reflex-faces -->
Calibration: AI-generated interfaces cluster around a few looks regardless of subject: warm cream ground, high-contrast serif display, and a terracotta or signal-red accent; near-black with one neon accent and glowing edges; broadsheet-editorial hairlines, italic display serif, and small tracked mono labels. All are legitimate when the brief calls for them; the brief always wins. Where the brief leaves the aesthetic free, landing in one of them means the self-check failed: if someone could guess your aesthetic from the category alone, or from category-plus-avoidance, rework until neither answer is obvious. <!-- rule:skill-calibration-saturated-looks --> Energy is not the enemy of trust: a brief's negative constraints (no gamification, no hype) rule out those devices, not exuberance, and adjectives describing the product's behavior (quiet support, calm coaching) do not dictate the surface's energy. <!-- rule:skill-constraints-rule-out-devices-not-energy --> A bookish, warm, or child-facing subject does not soften the calibration: book cloth, thread, jackets, endpapers, and shelf ephemera span the whole saturated spectrum, and cream paper is the smallest corner of that world; landing on cream plus serif for a book subject is the default wearing the subject's clothes. <!-- rule:skill-book-subject-not-cream-license --> A brief-pinned world pins the world, not its softest rendition: the pinned world's full material range stays in play, and a rendition that matches what any model ships for that world failed the self-check at execution rather than selection. <!-- rule:skill-pinned-world-not-default-rendition -->
Calibration: AI-generated interfaces cluster around a few looks regardless of subject: warm cream ground, high-contrast serif display, and a terracotta or signal-red accent; near-black with one neon accent and glowing edges; broadsheet-editorial hairlines, italic display serif, and small tracked mono labels. All are legitimate when the brief calls for them. Where the brief leaves the aesthetic free, landing in one means the self-check failed: if someone could guess your aesthetic from the category alone, or from category-plus-avoidance, rework until neither answer is obvious. <!-- rule:skill-calibration-saturated-looks --> Energy is not the enemy of trust: a brief's negative constraints (no gamification, no hype) rule out those devices, not exuberance, and adjectives describing the product's behavior (quiet support, calm coaching) do not dictate the surface's energy. <!-- rule:skill-constraints-rule-out-devices-not-energy --> A bookish, warm, or child-facing subject does not soften the calibration: book cloth, thread, jackets, endpapers, and shelf ephemera span the whole saturated spectrum, and cream paper is the smallest corner of that world; landing on cream plus serif for a book subject is the default wearing the subject's clothes. <!-- rule:skill-book-subject-not-cream-license --> A brief-pinned world pins the world, not its softest rendition: the pinned world's full material range stays in play, and a rendition that matches what any model ships for that world failed the self-check at execution rather than selection. <!-- rule:skill-pinned-world-not-default-rendition -->
<claude>
Your measured rendition prior: warm, bookish, family, and child-facing subjects come out as cream grounds, serif display with italic accents, and lamplight, even when the assigned direction never asked for them. Treat that first palette as already spent. Before writing code, reread your OWN-WORLD block: when it says cream, paper, parchment, ivory, or lamplight for a Persuade surface the brief did not pin, the rendition failed and you rework it from the world's saturated materials first. The same subject renders as bookcloth, thread, jacket, and endpaper color on other models; nothing about the subject requires your default.
@@ -70,9 +70,9 @@ Your measured rendition prior: warm, bookish, family, and child-facing subjects
## 5. Record the decision
Before code, state the chosen direction as a contract in the artifact's opening comment, five short blocks, 150 words at most, in a form that survives the production build: an HTML comment in the emitted markup, never only a templating-frontmatter comment the compiler strips, and placed as the first child of the document's body in the root layout, never inside a slotted or child component, because some compilers (Astro among them) strip a slot's leading comment while keeping deeper ones. After the first production build, grep the built output for the seed key; a contract the build erased is a contract nobody can audit. THESIS: the one idea this surface owns and the category-default arrangement it refuses. OWN-WORLD: the palette and component language, specific enough to be recognizable with all content removed. STORY: what the visitor understands, believes, and does. FIRST VIEWPORT: the exact composition, what is where and at what scale, and where the primary action sits. FORM: the chosen form, its position on your ordered list, the staging chosen for it, and the seed key the script printed; when the seed dealt stagings, choosing the world does not silently discharge the staging decision, so name the one you commit to. Close the comment with one more line, FINISH: the run's exit condition, verbatim "unreviewed and undocumented is unfinished; this build ends with the finish review, the verdict, and DESIGN.md". The comment sits at the top of the artifact you re-open on every edit, which makes it the one reminder that survives a long build: a page that looks complete with the FINISH line undischarged is not done, it is abandoned at the finish line. If a block reads like a mood, the direction is not decided yet; the finishing review audits the render against this contract. <!-- rule:skill-decide-then-build -->
Before code, state the chosen direction as a contract in the artifact's opening comment, five short blocks, 150 words at most, in a form that survives the production build: an HTML comment in the emitted markup, never only a templating-frontmatter comment, placed as the first child of the document's body in the root layout, never inside a slotted or child component (some compilers, Astro among them, strip a slot's leading comment while keeping deeper ones). After the first production build, grep the built output for the seed key; a contract the build erased is a contract nobody can audit. THESIS: the one idea this surface owns and the category-default arrangement it refuses. OWN-WORLD: the palette and component language, specific enough to be recognizable with all content removed. STORY: what the visitor understands, believes, and does. FIRST VIEWPORT: the exact composition, what is where and at what scale, and where the primary action sits. FORM: the chosen form, its position on your ordered list, the staging chosen for it, and the seed key the script printed; when the seed dealt stagings, choosing the world does not silently discharge the staging decision, so name the one you commit to. Close the comment with one more line, FINISH: the run's exit condition, verbatim "unreviewed and undocumented is unfinished; this build ends with the finish review, the verdict, and DESIGN.md". The comment tops the artifact you re-open on every edit, the one reminder that survives a long build: a page that looks complete with the FINISH line undischarged is not done, it is abandoned at the finish line. If a block reads like a mood, the direction is not decided yet; the finishing review audits the render against this contract. <!-- rule:skill-decide-then-build -->
On a new or replacement world, DESIGN.md is written at finish, from the built world, by the shipped documenter (section 7); a rulebook written before the build gets defended against reality instead of describing it, and it hands the design-system detector an unstable target that buries the build in noise. A new world shipped with no DESIGN.md is still an incomplete run. An ordinary extension does not rewrite DESIGN.md. <!-- rule:skill-design-md-from-the-build -->
On a new or replacement world, DESIGN.md is written at finish, from the built world, by the shipped documenter (section 7); a rulebook written before the build gets defended against reality instead of describing it, and hands the design-system detector an unstable target. A new world shipped with no DESIGN.md is still an incomplete run. An ordinary extension does not rewrite DESIGN.md. <!-- rule:skill-design-md-from-the-build -->
If the work establishes durable strategy for a route or artifact, read its existing surface brief, then update it:
@@ -91,8 +91,8 @@ For `shape`, return the selected direction to [shape.md](shape.md) and stop befo
Build the assigned direction, not a safer interpretation of it. The form supplies structure, reading order, component conventions, and native motion; the product supplies every fact. Commit every atom: nav, buttons, inputs, and links are rebuilt in the form's vocabulary, and a stock component inside a committed form is a lapse. Land the first build fully committed; committing is the hard part, and the passes that follow exist to make the committed thing clear and effective, never to dilute it. In unattended work, the safe rendition is the known risk. <!-- rule:skill-commit-every-atom -->
- **The first viewport is a thesis, not a header.** Demonstrate the mechanism immediately, at the scale the form has in life; do not trap the concept inside a standard hero or card shell. The memory test: if someone left after one viewport, what would they describe an hour later? If the honest answer is a mood, the concept has not committed yet.
- **Prove, don't claim.** Show the subject doing its job: the interface at work, the mechanism dramatized, specifics a competitor could not copy-paste. Sections that restate a claim in different words add length, not substance. Demonstration data is design material: author it at full fidelity and label it synthetic; never invent prices, customers, benchmarks, or capabilities.
- **Author the assets; never substitute chrome.** Great surfaces live on carefully made content: names, entries, copy, covers, thumbnails, textures. In greenfield work every blank the ask round left open is yours to author at production fidelity; content is authorable, claims are labelable, no section is omittable. An unanswered commercial claim ships as a clearly marked placeholder on the user's replacement list. When image generation exists, producing the design's imagery is part of building, at the scale the composition needs: a viewport that wants atmosphere gets a full-bleed layered scene, and a library of small centered subjects standardized for tidiness forecloses that before a line of code exists. Gradients, glass, and generic icon tiles where an authored asset belongs are the gap wearing chrome; icons drawn in the world's own grammar are the remedy, not the target. <!-- rule:skill-author-assets-not-chrome -->
- **Prove, don't claim.** Show the subject doing its job: the interface at work, the mechanism dramatized, specifics a competitor could not copy-paste. Sections that restate a claim in different words add length, not substance. Demonstration data is design material: author it at full fidelity and label it synthetic; claims stay uninventable.
- **Author the assets; never substitute chrome.** Great surfaces live on carefully made content: names, entries, copy, covers, thumbnails, textures. In greenfield work every blank the ask round left open is yours to author at production fidelity; content is authorable, claims are labelable, no section is omittable. An unanswered commercial claim ships as a clearly marked placeholder on the user's replacement list. When image generation exists, producing the design's imagery is part of building, at the scale the composition needs: a viewport that wants atmosphere gets a full-bleed layered scene, and a library of small centered subjects standardized for tidiness forecloses it. Gradients, glass, and generic icon tiles where an authored asset belongs are the gap wearing chrome; icons drawn in the world's own grammar are the remedy, not the target. <!-- rule:skill-author-assets-not-chrome -->
- **Build the form's web leverage.** When the chosen world names a technique (canvas, WebGL, view transitions, generative motion), build the technique itself, not a static imitation of it; the graceful fallback serves constrained clients, it is not the default experience.
- **Pace the scroll like a studio.** Vary density, scale, image, motion, and quiet inside one grammar; a dense passage earns a quiet one, and the page ends anchored by a real close. One spacing rhythm throughout, with more space above a heading than below it.
- **Use real, verified imagery when the brief implies it.** Search for the subject's physical object rather than the category; one decisive photo beats five mediocre ones. Verify stock URLs resolve.
@@ -102,8 +102,8 @@ Preserve semantics, accessibility, performance, responsiveness, project conventi
## 7. Inspect and finish
Inspect desktop and mobile in one batched screenshot round, critique the render against the user's request and the direction contract, fix material gaps, and confirm with one final round; two rounds is the ceiling, and fixes batch between them rather than earning per-tweak screenshots. When an approved comp exists, the critique is a side-by-side: view the comp region and the build region together, the hero and each section as its own crop at legible scale, never one full-page thumbnail where every module shrinks into sameness. A full-page screenshot hides exactly the failures that matter, crude controls, wrong lettering character, flattened material, behind a superficially similar section order. On a Persuade surface, verify the mode did its job: a first-time visitor should know what this is, why it matters, and what to do within seconds, in the form's own vocabulary.
Inspect desktop and mobile in one batched screenshot round, critique the render against the user's request and the direction contract, fix material gaps, and confirm with one final round; two rounds is the ceiling, and fixes batch between them rather than earning per-tweak screenshots. When an approved comp exists, the critique is a side-by-side: view the comp region and the build region together, the hero and each section as its own crop at legible scale, never one full-page thumbnail, which hides exactly the failures that matter, crude controls, wrong lettering character, flattened material, behind a superficially similar section order. On a Persuade surface, verify the mode did its job: a first-time visitor should know what this is, why it matters, and what to do within seconds, in the form's own vocabulary.
After the second inspection round the build thread's polishing is over: no further defect hunts, micro-edit scripts, or rebuilds here; whatever remains ships through the handoffs, where a fresh context does the finding better and cheaper. Capture desktop and mobile screenshots to files, then spawn the shipped finish reviewer, `impeccable-finish-reviewer` (`impeccable_finish_reviewer` in codex; `/impeccable-finish-reviewer` in Cursor; on GitHub Copilot say "Use the impeccable-finish-reviewer agent"), with the original request, confirmed answers, the artifact path, the screenshot paths, its direction contract, existing hook findings, and the QUALITY BAR card and approved comp paths. The reviewer has no browser; screenshots you fail to pass are checks it cannot run. Verify its return carries the five contract sections; on an empty or thrashed return, respawn once with the same inputs before doing anything else. This review never runs inside the build thread, and it never inherits the build thread: spawn the reviewer fresh, with no forked conversation history (`fork_turns: 0` in codex), because a reviewer that inherits your transcript inherits your framing, your optimism, and your abstractions, and everything it legitimately needs travels in the inputs listed above. Only a harness whose tool surface has no subagent capability at all substitutes a fresh in-thread pass after stepping fully out of the build context, run from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md), and a substituted or failed-and-replaced review is disclosed in one line at finish, never silently. When the reviewer's first material fix is a rebuild directive, fidelity failed wholesale rather than in patches, so skip the fix batch: put that verdict in front of the user with the named comp regions and let them choose between a re-derivation and shipping as it stands. Otherwise apply the material fixes in one batch, rebuild once, and recapture the same viewports. A recapture measures positions, loading, and overflow; it cannot measure whether a fix reached the quality the finding named, so send the recaptured screenshots back to the same reviewer for a verdict scoring every material fix resolved, partial, or unresolved (through the harness's agent continuation; without one, run the scoring fresh from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md)'s Verdict Pass). Fixes scored partial or unresolved get another batch, recapture, and verdict. Two rounds is the budget an unattended run ends at; an attended session's ceiling belongs to the user, so when the second verdict still lists open items, put the table in front of them and let them choose between shipping as it stands and funding another round. Whoever is deciding, stop the moment a round resolves nothing, and the reviewer's findings are the only list you work from, never your own re-opened hunt. Report the final verdict table to the user as it stands, open items included: presenting mechanical confirmation as artistic success is how a failed build gets announced as a finished one. Do not run a second detector. <!-- rule:skill-verdict-bounds-the-finish --> <!-- rule:skill-finish-separate-reviewer -->
After the second inspection round the build thread's polishing is over: no further defect hunts, micro-edit scripts, or rebuilds here; whatever remains ships through the handoffs, where a fresh context does the finding better and cheaper. Where this harness runs no design hook, run `node {{scripts_path}}/detect.mjs --json` on the changed targets once here, fix what is mechanical, and pass the remaining findings to the reviewer; a hookless build that skips this ships every tell the hook exists to catch. Capture desktop and mobile screenshots to files, then spawn the shipped finish reviewer, `impeccable-finish-reviewer` (`impeccable_finish_reviewer` in codex; `/impeccable-finish-reviewer` in Cursor; on GitHub Copilot say "Use the impeccable-finish-reviewer agent"), with the original request, confirmed answers, the artifact path, the screenshot paths, its direction contract, existing hook findings, and the QUALITY BAR card and approved comp paths. The reviewer has no browser; screenshots you fail to pass are checks it cannot run. Verify its return carries the five contract sections; on an empty or thrashed return, respawn once with the same inputs before doing anything else. This review never runs inside the build thread and never inherits it: spawn the reviewer fresh, with no forked conversation history (`fork_turns: 0` in codex); a reviewer that inherits your transcript inherits your framing, your optimism, and your abstractions, and everything it needs travels in the inputs above. Only a harness whose tool surface has no subagent capability at all substitutes a fresh in-thread pass after stepping fully out of the build context, run from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md), and a substituted or failed-and-replaced review is disclosed in one line at finish, never silently. When the reviewer's first material fix is a rebuild directive, fidelity failed wholesale rather than in patches, so skip the fix batch: put that verdict in front of the user with the named comp regions and let them choose between a re-derivation and shipping as it stands. Otherwise apply the material fixes in one batch, rebuild once, and recapture the same viewports. A recapture measures positions, loading, and overflow; it cannot measure whether a fix reached the quality the finding named, so send the recaptured screenshots back to the same reviewer for a verdict scoring every material fix resolved, partial, or unresolved (through the harness's agent continuation; without one, run the scoring fresh from [degraded/finish-reviewer.md](degraded/finish-reviewer.md)'s Verdict Pass). Fixes scored partial or unresolved get another batch, recapture, and verdict. Two rounds is the budget an unattended run ends at; an attended session's ceiling belongs to the user, so when the second verdict still lists open items, put the table in front of them and let them choose between shipping as it stands and funding another round. Whoever is deciding, stop the moment a round resolves nothing, and the reviewer's findings are the only list you work from, never your own re-opened hunt. Report the final verdict table to the user as it stands, open items included, under the reviewer's own disposition word: a table with open material findings is never announced as a pass, and never under a softer label than the reviewer wrote. Do not run a second detector. <!-- rule:skill-verdict-bounds-the-finish --> <!-- rule:skill-finish-separate-reviewer -->
Then spawn the shipped documenter, `impeccable-documenter` (`impeccable_documenter` in codex), with the project root, the artifact path, the direction contract, PRODUCT.md, the [document.md](document.md) reference path, and the boundary to write at; it records DESIGN.md and the sidecar from the built world, ground truth over intention; without subagents the pass runs from [degraded/documenter.md](degraded/documenter.md). A clean detector pass is not finished; finished is the contract kept, the comp honored, the review closed, and the system recorded. <!-- rule:skill-documenter-records-the-world -->
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@@ -6,7 +6,7 @@ The purpose of a probe is to test composition, narrative, hierarchy, density, fo
## Generate three compositional options
Render three distinct high-fidelity north-star comps of the requested surface, with whatever generation capability exists, saved under `.impeccable/mocks/` so they survive the session; record the approved comp's path in the surface brief. Comp at the surface's own viewport: portrait at device size for a native app or mobile-first surface, desktop landscape otherwise; a phone screen comped landscape misstates the composition before anything gets built against it. Comps are the build thread's own work, never delegated: the thread that writes the comp prompts holds the direction's full context, and it has already seen every comp when the build starts. Open every image you produce or reference by its workspace-relative path, never an absolute one: sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths, and everything under the project root has a relative path. Base them on the real content and the surface concepts already developed with the user. Three is the number: one comp invites rubber-stamping, and the spread between three is what surfaces the composition worth building. A decision-page sketch is not a probe: it chose the direction at deliberately unfinished fidelity, so the three comps render regardless, and the chosen card's sketch seeds at most one of them.
Render three distinct high-fidelity north-star comps of the requested surface, with whatever generation capability exists, saved under `.impeccable/mocks/` so they survive the session. Comp at the surface's own viewport: portrait at device size for a native app or mobile-first surface, desktop landscape otherwise; a phone screen comped landscape misstates the composition before anything gets built against it. Comps are the build thread's own work, never delegated: the thread that writes the comp prompts holds the direction's full context, and it has already seen every comp when the build starts. Open every image you produce or reference by its workspace-relative path, never an absolute one: sandboxed viewers reject absolute paths, and everything under the project root has a relative path. Base them on the real content and the surface concepts already developed with the user. Three is the number: one comp invites rubber-stamping, and the spread between three is what surfaces the composition worth building. A decision-page sketch is not a probe: it chose the direction at deliberately unfinished fidelity, so the three comps render regardless, and the chosen card's sketch seeds at most one of them.
- A comp is a designed surface, not a picture of the subject. Lead the generation prompt with the surface's own structure, whatever regions this design actually has, named in order with their scale relationships; a page with no navigation states that instead of inventing one, and an unconventional surface states its unconventional skeleton. A prompt that leads with the world's atmosphere gets a vignette back: the model paints the fish market instead of the fish market's website. Self-check every render: if it could hang as a poster, or reads as a photograph or scene with some text on it, it is not a comp; regenerate with the layout scaffold stated more literally.
- When the user shortlisted multiple concepts, spread the three across them.
@@ -22,21 +22,25 @@ Show the three together: in the harness when it can display images, otherwise on
Do not begin code until the user approves a direction or explicitly delegates the choice. If they delegate, choose using the task brief, PRODUCT.md, and DESIGN.md, and state the evidence. Approval refines the task concept; it does not modify DESIGN.md.
This approval point has no substitute and no skip condition. When the structured question tool errors, fall back to the decision page; only after both fail may you treat the choice as delegated, and a delegated pick is still recorded in the surface brief and the chosen comp's sidecar and disclosed in your first reply, not your last. The finish reviewer treats a build with generated comps and no recorded approval as carrying a material finding.
This approval point has no substitute and no skip condition. When the structured question tool errors, fall back to the decision page; only after both fail may you treat the choice as delegated, and a delegated pick is still recorded exactly as an approval is and disclosed in your first reply, not your last. The finish reviewer treats a build with generated comps and no recorded approval as carrying a material finding.
After approval, record the choice where tools can find it: the approved comp's path goes in the surface brief, and the approved comp's `.json` prompt sidecar gains `"approved": true` (every comp generated through `generate-image.mjs` has one; create it if a native tool didn't). The sidecar travels with the mocks folder, so the approval survives sessions and machines that never see the brief. Then summarize the composition and the parts of the comp that must not be literalized, return to new-work.md, record the direction contract from the approved surface concept, and build.
## Inventory implementation fidelity
Before building, inventory the approved comp's major visible ingredients in writing (a short table in the surface brief or working notes; the finish reviewer audits shipped assets against it) and choose an implementation medium for each: semantic HTML/CSS/SVG, existing project asset, generated raster, sourced raster, icon library, canvas/WebGL, or accepted omission. The same written inventory names the comp's compositional commitments: navigation items and icons, headline levels and their scale relationship, signature geometry such as seams, masks, and overlaps, and each section's arrangement and density. An element never written down is the element the build silently drops, and the direction contract's 150 words cannot carry this list, so this inventory is where it lives. The medium column is where an approved design most often dies, so it obeys a gate: the medium is decided by what the comp region shows, never by what feels buildable in the current stack. A human figure, a product object, machinery, or any material with lighting and depth is raster whatever the stack; writing "silhouette" for a photographic figure, or "CSS" for a sculpted panel's finish, is not a medium choice, it is the quiet deletion of the approved design, and it is how a comp full of physical material becomes a flat page with the same section order. Style does not move this boundary: a comp region with perspective, shading, figure drawing, or dense mechanical detail is illustration however line-drawn it looks, and no build session can author illustration as vectors, so it regenerates as raster like any photograph. Authored SVG covers what a session can specify exactly, diagrams with countable elements, controls, flat shape systems, and it ends where drawing skill begins; an instruction-manual world does not convert its illustrations into diagrams, it makes them line-art illustrations. Produce such regions by regenerating them cleanly, with the approved comp and its embedded prompt as the reference for a fresh render at asset resolution; never crop pixels out of the comp itself, whose effective resolution sits far below asset grade. Dropping an image-native region instead of producing it is a scope decision the user makes at the approval point, never a silent flattening after it. Generated imagery is a material, not a claim: evidence rules bind assertions, specs, testimonials, and photographs presented as real, never render fidelity, so "no photography on hand" forbids fake proof, not an illustrated hero. The affinity still runs both ways: precise geometry, hard-edged shape systems, diagrams, expressive motion, shaders, and anything interactive are vector and GPU territory, SVG, canvas, WebGL, where reaching for a raster flattens what should move, scale, and respond, and code executed safely and professionally remains first-class there. Raster is for what the world paints; code is for what the world draws, animates, or reacts with, and choosing code there is ambition, not economy. Every `produce` entry is produced before the build ships, through the asset producer or in the current thread; an inventory with unproduced entries is an unfinished build, and this gate is where imagery-free pages come from when it is skipped.
Before building, inventory the approved comp's major visible ingredients in writing (a short table in the surface brief or working notes; the finish reviewer audits shipped assets against it) and choose an implementation medium for each: semantic HTML/CSS/SVG, existing project asset, generated raster, sourced raster, icon library, canvas/WebGL, or accepted omission. The same written inventory names the comp's compositional commitments: navigation items and icons, headline levels and their scale relationship, signature geometry such as seams, masks, and overlaps, and each section's arrangement and density. An element never written down is the element the build silently drops, and the direction contract's 150 words cannot carry this list, so this inventory is where it lives.
Pay special attention to the dominant composition, signature use, image-native content, second-fold system, and any interaction the still image only implies. If the concept depends on a photograph, architectural scene, product object, portrait, or other raster-native material, do not silently replace it with generic CSS scenery.
The medium column is where an approved design most often dies, so it obeys a gate: the medium is decided by what the comp region shows, never by what feels buildable in the current stack. A human figure, a product object, machinery, or any material with lighting and depth is raster whatever the stack; writing "silhouette" for a photographic figure, or "CSS" for a sculpted panel's finish, is not a medium choice, it is the quiet deletion of the approved design, and it is how a comp full of physical material becomes a flat page with the same section order. Style does not move this boundary: a comp region with perspective, shading, figure drawing, or dense mechanical detail is illustration however line-drawn it looks, and no build session can author illustration as vectors, so it regenerates as raster like any photograph. Authored SVG covers what a session can specify exactly, diagrams with countable elements, controls, flat shape systems, and it ends where drawing skill begins; an instruction-manual world does not convert its illustrations into diagrams, it makes them line-art illustrations. Produce such regions by regenerating them cleanly, with the approved comp and its embedded prompt as the reference for a fresh render at asset resolution; never crop pixels out of the comp itself, whose effective resolution sits far below asset grade. Dropping an image-native region instead of producing it is a scope decision the user makes at the approval point, never a silent flattening after it. Generated imagery is a material, not a claim: evidence rules bind assertions, specs, testimonials, and photographs presented as real, never render fidelity, so "no photography on hand" forbids fake proof, not an illustrated hero.
The gate runs both ways: precise geometry, hard-edged shape systems, diagrams, expressive motion, shaders, and anything interactive are vector and GPU territory (SVG, canvas, WebGL), where a raster flattens what should move, scale, and respond, and code executed safely and professionally remains first-class there. Raster is for what the world paints; code is for what the world draws, animates, or reacts with, and choosing code there is ambition, not economy. Every `produce` entry is produced before the build ships, through the asset producer or in the current thread; an inventory with unproduced entries is an unfinished build, and this gate is where imagery-free pages come from when it is skipped.
Pay special attention to the dominant composition, signature use, image-native content, second-fold system, and any interaction the still image only implies.
Treat the comp as a north star, not something to trace, and know what that allows: translation into semantic, responsive, accessible code, never recomposition. Keeping the palette and mood while redrawing the topology is a second art direction, not an adaptation. Do not rasterize core UI text or controls. Do not substitute a different visual driver after approval without asking.
## Produce only the assets the build needs
Generation context is part of the asset: the thread that wrote a prompt knows what the image contains, why, and how it is meant to sit in the layout, and a build composed by a thread without that knowledge places assets it does not understand. So prefer generating build-critical imagery in the build thread when the budget allows, and when a subagent produces assets instead, every asset must carry its prompt, and the builder reads those prompts before composing a single one of them. The carrier is uniform across harnesses: after generating any image with any tool, native or `generate-image.mjs` (which does it automatically), run `node {{scripts_path}}/embed-prompt.mjs <image> --prompt "<the prompt used>"` so the intent lives inside the file itself and survives copies between machines and harnesses; `--read` recovers it from any impeccable-generated image.
Generation context is part of the asset: a build composed by a thread that never saw the prompts places assets it does not understand. So prefer generating build-critical imagery in the build thread when the budget allows, and when a subagent produces assets instead, every asset must carry its prompt, and the builder reads those prompts before composing a single one of them. The carrier is uniform across harnesses: after generating any image with any tool, native or `generate-image.mjs` (which does it automatically), run `node {{scripts_path}}/embed-prompt.mjs <image> --prompt "<the prompt used>"` so the intent lives inside the file itself and survives copies between machines and harnesses; `--read` recovers it from any impeccable-generated image.
When clean raster ingredients are required and the harness runs subagents, use the shipped asset producer, `impeccable-asset-producer` (`impeccable_asset_producer` in codex; `/impeccable-asset-producer` in Cursor; on GitHub Copilot say "Use the impeccable-asset-producer agent"): give it the approved comp, output paths, required dimensions and formats, transparency needs, crop notes, and what must remain semantic code. Otherwise produce the minimum required assets in the current thread by the book: load [degraded/asset-producer.md](degraded/asset-producer.md) and follow it inline, with whatever generation exists, the native tool or generate-image.mjs.