skill: drop quality tiers, keep the real brand-craft guardrails

Codex's craft/brand pass introduced fast/ship/showpiece "quality bars"
plus brand-specific build gates, asset ledgers, sub-agent review, and
self-graded fallback labels. In practice those tiers became escape
hatches rather than craft pressure: the final output should always be
10/10, and the real decision points are splashiness and maximalism, not
quality.

Removed:
- All quality-bar / showpiece / fast / ship framing in shape.md and craft.md
- Standalone Brand Direction (#4) and Asset Requirements (#10) sections
  in shape's brief; renumbered back to 1-10
- The Brand hard rules section in brand.md (folded its real prohibitions
  into the existing Imagery and Brand bans sections)
- Brand-specific build-gate item, mock-fidelity bullet, production-bar
  bullet, present-step bullet in craft.md
- Asset ledger ceremony in craft Step 4
- Review-only sub-agents and "self-reviewed fallback, not independently
  validated" machinery in craft.md and polish.md
- The For brand surfaces, assess hard failures subsection in polish.md
  and the brand checklist row
- tests/brand-showpiece-reference.test.mjs (and its package.json wiring)

Kept (the real nuggets):
- Asset-substitution prohibition: image-led briefs ship real/generated
  assets or canvas/SVG/WebGL, not generic CSS panels, cards, bullets,
  or copy
- Repeated tiny uppercase tracked kicker labels as a brand ban
- Detector/QA output is defect evidence only, never proof of quality
- "What visual assets are real content here?" discovery question
- Inspect each major section individually for brand and long-form work
- repeated-section-kickers detection rule + fixture
- CLI improvements (JSON to stdout, -json/-fast aliases, severity field)
- critique.md: npx impeccable detect --json fix

Harness output dirs refreshed via bun run build. Full test suite (186)
passes.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.7 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul Bakaus
2026-05-05 10:40:28 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 4.7
parent e587004ee4
commit a8b032d362
76 changed files with 783 additions and 141 deletions
+2 -1
View File
@@ -79,7 +79,7 @@ Brand surfaces have permission for Committed, Full palette, and Drenched strateg
Brand surfaces lean on imagery. A restaurant, hotel, magazine, or product landing page without any imagery reads as incomplete, not as restrained. A solid-color rectangle where a hero image should go is worse than a representative stock photo.
**When the brief implies imagery (restaurants, hotels, magazines, photography, hobbyist communities, food, travel, fashion, product), you must ship imagery.** Zero images is a bug, not a design choice. "Restraint" is not an excuse.
**When the brief implies imagery (restaurants, hotels, magazines, photography, hobbyist communities, food, travel, fashion, product), you must ship imagery.** Zero images is a bug, not a design choice. "Restraint" is not an excuse. If the approved comp or brief is image-led, ship real project assets, generated raster assets, or a credible canvas/SVG/WebGL scene. Do not replace photographic, architectural, product, or place imagery with generic CSS panels, decorative diagrams, cards, bullets, or copy.
- **For greenfield work without local assets, use stock imagery.** Unsplash is the default. The URL shape is `https://images.unsplash.com/photo-{id}?auto=format&fit=crop&w=1600&q=80`. Pick real Unsplash photo IDs you're confident exist (`photo-1559339352-11d035aa65de`, `photo-1590490360182-c33d57733427`, etc.); if unsure, pick fewer photos but don't substitute colored `<div>` placeholders.
- **Search for the brand's physical object**, not the generic category: "handmade pasta on a scratched wooden table" beats "Italian food"; "cypress trees above a limestone hotel facade at dusk" beats "luxury hotel".
@@ -102,6 +102,7 @@ Tech / dev-tool brands are the exception where zero imagery can be correct; a de
- Timid palettes and average layouts. Safe = invisible.
- Zero imagery on a brief that implies imagery (restaurant, hotel, food, travel, fashion, photography, hobbyist). Colored blocks where a hero photo belongs.
- Defaulting to editorial-magazine aesthetics (display serif + italic + drop caps + broadsheet grid) on briefs that aren't magazine-shaped. Editorial is ONE aesthetic lane, not the default brand aesthetic.
- Repeated tiny uppercase tracked labels above every section heading. A single strong kicker can be voice; repeating it as section grammar is AI scaffolding unless it's a deliberate, named brand system.
## Brand permissions