/critique

name: critique
description: Adversarial design critique of the current work — render it, look at it, and argue for rejection. Run after the gates are green, never instead of them.
# Converted from .claude/commands/ so it has a CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR of its own and
# its paths resolve on every install route.
disable-model-invocation: true
# The critic runs in a forked subagent: a fresh context that never sees the
# conversation that produced the work. That is the whole point. A critic that
# has read the maker's reasoning is reviewing the argument, not the artifact,
# and it agrees far too easily.
context: fork
# Wait for the verdict in this turn. Forked skills run in the background by
# default, which would hand the user a "started" message and no critique.
# Requires Claude Code v2.1.218 or later.
background: false
#
# There is deliberately NO `agent:` field, and it is not an oversight.
#
# A plugin namespaces every component under the plugin name, so this repo's
# critic is `design-critic` when installed with `npx ux-ui-skills init` (a
# project file in .claude/agents/) and `ux-ui-agent-skills:design-critic` when
# installed as a plugin. One frontmatter value cannot be both, and a wrong one
# is the `invocation:` failure again: a field that looks right, is silently
# ignored or unresolved, and leaves the behaviour it promised switched off.
#
# So the fork is generic and the body below loads the critic's instructions from
# a ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}-relative path, which does resolve on both routes.

You are now running in a forked context. You cannot see the conversation that produced this work, you cannot ask the user a question, and nothing you learned elsewhere applies. Everything you need is below or on disk.

**Step 0 — is the kit here?**

ls ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../../../tokens >/dev/null 2>&1 && echo KIT_OK || echo KIT_MISSING

On `KIT_MISSING` only the skill folders were installed, which is what `npx skills add` does. Say so plainly, point at `npx ux-ui-agent-skills init` or the plugin install, and stop. Do not guess the contents of a file you could not open.

**Step 1 — take the critic's instructions, in full.**

cat ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../../../.claude/agents/design-critic.md

That file is your brief: the stance, the three rules you never break, and the verdict format. Read it and follow it literally. If it is missing, say so and stop rather than improvising a critique — an unbriefed critic is a second opinion, not a review.

**Step 2 — resolve the target.**

Target: `$ARGUMENTS` — a file or a directory.

You cannot ask. If `$ARGUMENTS` is empty or names nothing that exists, say exactly what you were given, list what you would have accepted, and stop. A critique of a guessed target is worse than no critique, because it reads like a verdict on the real work.

**Step 3 — refuse to critique blind.**

A critique written from source alone is worthless. Render the target and look at it: screenshot every screen or harness at 1280 and 390 wide, light and dark, transitions off and the pointer parked off the UI. Then click every control and write down what actually changed. A control that changes nothing is a finding.

**Step 4 — gather the numbers you will cite.**

KIT=${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR}/../../..
node $KIT/scripts/taste_audit.mjs      <file> && node $KIT/scripts/taste_audit.mjs <file> --dark
node $KIT/scripts/slop_tells.mjs       <file> && node $KIT/scripts/slop_tells.mjs  <file> --dark
node $KIT/scripts/verify_overflow.mjs  <file|dir>
node $KIT/scripts/verify_responsive.mjs <file|dir> --scale=1.25

Report what they actually printed. These are heuristics: they name what you saw, they do not decide whether it is good. A clean run is not a defence: the kit's own seeded-defect fixtures pass every one of these gates, in both themes, and every one of them is work a senior designer would send back.

**Step 5 — write the verdict.**

In the format `design-critic.md` specifies: the verdict, the three reasons a senior designer would send this back, and the findings table with evidence per finding. Name the file and the element. "The spacing feels off" is not a finding; "the card's 12px internal gap is the same as the 12px gap between cards, so the grouping reads as one block" is.

Do not soften it, and do not pad the "what is good" list to balance the tone.

**Step 6 — state the scope, every time.**

This is judgement, not measurement. It produces no percentage, and no percentage in this repo covers taste. Say so in the output.

---

After the critique comes back

For the session that invoked this skill, not for the fork:

Act on it. Fix every Critical and Major finding, re-run `/gate`, and run this critique again on what changed. The loop ends when the remaining findings are Minor or Enhancement — not when you are tired of it.

Scoring the critic itself, rather than the work, is a maintainer task and lives with the harness in the kit's repository - not here. This skill installs into your project, and nothing it tells you to do should name a file your install does not have.