Interface review

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This repository (Asymmetric-al/core)

This is a change-review companion. Load better-writing with it when copy is in scope. Do not treat it as a mandate to restyle Core apps. Keep Core's Base UI, base-maia style, Zinc tokens, and docs/ai/rules/frontend.md authoritative. Reconcile this overlay after upstream refreshes before running bun run skills:sync.

Triggers

• Reviewing a UI change across polish, type, layout, color, writing, and accessibility categories.
• Pair with interface-review only when that explicit review skill is invoked.

Workflow

1. Stay on the changed surfaces. Do not audit the whole product.
2. Defer Core a11y ownership to docs/ai/skills/accessibility-review/SKILL.md.
3. Keep base-maia, Base UI, and frontend.md above generic taste notes.
4. Load docs/ai/skills/better-writing/SKILL.md when writing findings need the dedicated copy skill.

Checklist

• Findings stayed on the change, not a redesign brief.
• better-writing was used when copy was in scope.

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This skill runs a cross-discipline review. It routes the interface to each better-* skill, collects their evidence and consolidates one ranked verdict.

Orchestration is all it owns. Accessibility rules belong to better-accessibility, structure to better-layout, copy to better-writing, type to better-typography, color to better-colors, visual polish and motion to better-ui. Never duplicate or override their rules here.

Change-scoped review of uncommitted work, branches and pull requests belongs to interface-review, which resolves the scope and classifies findings before handing the review back.

Evidence, not taste

Press hard on the escalation triggers and leave deliberate project choices alone. Those pull the same way. A trigger is a failure whatever the style guide says; a density, radius, or voice you merely disagree with is not a finding.

So the bar for reporting is evidence, not taste. The bar for Approve is that you inspected what you claim to have inspected. A short report from a real inspection beats a long one padded to look thorough.

Core principles

1. Resolve the scope first

Infer the screen, flow, feature, or repository scope from the request and current workspace. State the resolved scope in the output.

Cover all of it across every domain skill listed under Use domain skills as the sources of truth, including the empty, loading, error and narrow-width states where they exist. Report at most 15 findings.

When the scope is too large to inspect credibly, narrow it to one complete flow: the one the request centers on, or failing that the entry path every user must pass through. State the boundary and what it excluded. Never imply uninspected surfaces were reviewed.

2. Send a change to interface-review

A request naming a branch, pull request, commit range, or uncommitted changes is a change review, not a screen review. Say so and ask the user to run interface-review, which is user-invoked and cannot be started from here.

Never resolve a change scope here. Reading a diff, classifying findings and expanding changed files to affected surfaces belong to interface-review. Guess at them and the report has a scope nobody can check.

When interface-review hands a review back, it supplies the change scope, a status per finding and the change-scoped report format. Severity, ranking, the cap and the verdict stay here, and all three cover Introduced and Regression only.

3. Recon before judgment

Identify the framework, styling system, component library, design tokens, supported viewports and any preview or test command. Write every fix in the project's own idiom, so no finding arrives as a request to adopt a different stack. That governs the form of the fix, not whether the code is good enough.

Then read what the project has written about its own interface: CONTRIBUTING.md, CODING_STANDARDS.md, AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, a design-system doc, Storybook docs, interface ADRs. Name which you found, or that there are none.

Read them to find where a finding belongs, not for permission to drop it. A documented convention is no evidence the convention is good, and "it's in the style guide" does not retire a finding. What they change is where you report. When a guideline or shared token is the cause, report it once against that source, with the components as its locations.

4. Use domain skills as the sources of truth

Before reviewing, confirm that every owning skill below is available. Load and apply every available owner, and complete each domain review before consolidation.

Review in this order so foundational failures are not hidden by polish:

1. better-accessibility
2. better-layout
3. better-writing
4. better-typography
5. better-colors
6. better-ui

From a domain skill loaded here, take its principles, its references and its verification checks. Its severity ladder and its format are for standalone use; the consolidated format, shared severity and finding cap in this file replace them.

If an owning skill is unavailable, mark that domain Not reviewed, name it and continue with the rest. Do not recreate its rules from memory, substitute a neighbour, or claim holistic coverage.

When two skills appear to cover one issue, assign it to the owner of the underlying rule and note secondary effects in the Why cell. Report it once.

5. Require evidence

Every finding cites path/to/file:line and shows the current implementation. Do not report a code-level finding from visual appearance alone or a visual finding from source code alone when runtime behavior determines the result.

6. Rank by user impact

Use one shared severity scale:

• HIGH: blocks a task, misleads the user, hides content or controls, causes data-loss risk, or creates a repeated systemic failure.
• MEDIUM: meaningfully harms comprehension, efficiency, adaptability, or consistency.
• LOW: isolated polish with limited task impact.

Within a severity, rank by how many places the finding reaches and how much one fix buys. A token or shared-component fix outranks the same symptom in one leaf.

Escalation triggers. Once the owning skill confirms one of these, it is HIGH on sight, never averaged down because the surface is minor:

• An interactive control with no accessible name.
• A keyboard-reachable control with no visible focus indicator.
• A control or path reachable by pointer but not by keyboard.
• Motion or auto-playing content that ignores prefers-reduced-motion.
• Content or a control clipped, overlapped, or unreachable at 320px width or 200% zoom.
• Body or control text whose rendered contrast pair fails its required ratio.
• State or meaning carried by color alone.
• A destructive action with no confirmation, undo, or distinct treatment.
• Truncated content with no way to reach the full value.
• Content or a control reachable only past a scroll edge or behind a disclosure that has no visible cue.
• An error that names no way to recover from it.
• A semantic color used against its meaning, such as the danger hue on a non-destructive action.
• A state change carried by motion alone, with no color, icon, or label left behind when the animation does not run.

Triggers rank above every other finding. When more fire than the cap allows, list them first and say how many the cap excluded. A cap may shorten a report; it may never be why a blocker went unreported.

These set severity, not new rules. The owning skill decides whether the symptom is present; this list decides what it costs. In a change review, a confirmed Regression against a trigger is HIGH even where the same symptom would be MEDIUM as pre-existing.

7. Prefer the cheaper fix

Severity says how bad a finding is; this says which fix to propose. When more than one would work, take the earliest that does:

1. Delete. A separator that space would carry, an animation on a high-frequency interaction, an ARIA attribute a native element makes redundant, a ramp nothing imports.
2. Use the platform. The native element, the native control, the browser's own focus ring, in place of a custom rebuild.
3. Reuse what the project has. An existing token, spacing step, or motion curve, before any new value.
4. Correct the value. The wrong easing, radius, gap, or contrast pair, using the exact value the owning skill gives.
5. Add. A new token, a wrapper, a media query, an ARIA attribute the platform cannot supply.

A fix written at step 5 where step 1 was available is its own finding. Report the deletion instead.

8. Consolidate systemic findings

One root cause is one finding. List every confirmed location in the same row rather than one row per occurrence. Never pad to reach the cap; a short review or no findings is a valid result.

9. Verify what can be verified

Run the safe, relevant checks the project offers. Inspect the rendered interface when runtime behavior or visual judgment matters, and report the exact command or interaction and its result. A check you cannot run is Not verified, never a finding.

10. Review without mutating by default

Treat a review request as read-only. Do not edit source unless the user also asks you to implement the findings. When they do, keep the consolidated report as the change scope and re-run the relevant verification afterward.

Before you finish

Mistake	Fix
Six disconnected domain reports	One ranked findings table
Visual claim inferred only from source	Inspect the rendered state, or mark it not verified
Silent gaps in coverage	Show which domains and states were actually inspected
Missing owning skill treated as covered	Mark the domain Not reviewed and name the skill
Every legacy issue in a touched file reported	Three pre-existing findings, in their own section
A pre-existing issue blocking a change review	Keep pre-existing findings out of the cap and out of the verdict
Domain marked Clear when the change never touched it	Mark it Not reviewed: no evidence in the change scope

Review output format

The format lives in review-format.md: scope and coverage, the findings table, verification and the verdict. A review is not finished until its findings are reported there.