Close the two escape hatches Opus used on kids-reading

Craft-gate forensics on matched hands: both models obeyed the same
assigned indices, but Opus rendered every kids cell as cream paper,
lamplight, and serif, and sample 1 chose Fraunces off the reflex list
with a bookshop-signage rationalization, while Sol rendered the same
positions as indigo bookcloth, coral thread, tomato, and marigold. The
dice work; the rendition prior escaped through two hatches, now closed:
naming a reflex face requires a reason no other face satisfies and a
subject association is never that reason; and bookish or child-facing
subjects do not soften the calibration, because cream paper is the
smallest corner of the book world.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Fable 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Paul Bakaus
2026-07-21 17:37:37 -07:00
co-authored by Claude Fable 5
parent 4df81d9e86
commit f5cee8ebec
+2 -2
View File
@@ -56,9 +56,9 @@ For **Persuade**, the opening must make the offer intelligible and desirable, ex
Pick a color strategy before picking colors: Restrained (neutrals plus one accent; the default when the visitor came to operate or read), Committed (one saturated color carries 30-60% of the surface), Full palette (3-4 named roles), or Drenched (the surface IS the color). Persuade and Experience surfaces have permission for the bolder strategies; take them when the brief allows. Color commits at page scale: fields that own whole regions, not accents scattered over a neutral ground. Dark or light is never a default: write one sentence of physical scene (who uses this, where, under what light) and let it force the answer. <!-- rule:skill-color-strategy -->
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. <!-- rule:skill-typo-reflex-faces -->
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 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; 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 -->
## 5. Record the decision