design-guard

Design Guard

Overview

Detect design drift without inventing product authority. Run mechanical checks first where possible, then perform judgment-based review only for relationships automation cannot decide.

When to use this skill

Use when:

• several design artifacts should express the same menu, page, route, state, or approved baseline;
• generated assets may have drifted from registries/specs;
• a candidate is about to be promoted, archived, or handed to implementation;
• “all files exist” is being mistaken for semantic or visual completion;
• two authoritative-looking sources disagree.

Do not use this skill to choose product behavior, redesign the UI, or silently repair conflicting decisions.

How to use this skill

1. Identify authority. Record artifact type, version, maturity, and the source that is authoritative for each concern.
2. Run mechanical checks first. Prefer deterministic comparison for IDs, labels, order, routes, manifest membership, references, schema, and file existence. If no checker exists, report that gap instead of pretending the check ran.
3. Run semantic checks. Compare behavior, states, permissions, navigation scope, and acceptance meaning across artifacts.
4. Run visual-continuity checks. Verify only what available images/screens can establish: shell structure, hierarchy, active state, token family, and obvious content drift.
5. Separate evidence gates. File existence, schema validity, semantic consistency, visual approval, runtime behavior, and user approval are independent.
6. Classify every finding. Use PASS, FAIL, NOT VERIFIED, or NEEDS DECISION.
7. Do not self-authorize fixes. Conflicting approved sources become blocking findings with affected downstream artifacts.
8. Publish an actionable report. Use references/report-contract.md.

Check categories are in references/check-catalog.md.

Best Practices

• Authority beats recency.
• Automation beats prose for mechanical invariants.
• No evidence, no PASS.
• A render is not an approval.
• A guard detects and scopes; it does not make product decisions.
• Every failure names affected downstream artifacts.
• Re-run checks after any authoritative source changes.

Output contract

Return:

• scope and authority map;
• mechanical-check evidence;
• semantic/visual findings;
• status per finding;
• affected artifacts;
• blocking decisions;
• safe next action.

Keywords

design guard, consistency review, design lint, navigation drift, spec drift, manifest check, visual baseline, design QA, design guard, consistency review, design drift, menu consistency