skill

Build modern frontends from 0 to 1 — the agent-era methodology for the one discipline whose correctness spec lives in a human nervous system, not a document, so taste is load-bearing and cannot be outsourced. A pipeline of eight gated lenses across the build lifecycle: bearings (before the first line — model the user's mind not the database, fix the boundaries and the source-of-truth one-way doors, write the perception contract where latency tiers become architecture, and set the objective function before the metrics dashboard exists to pull you), keel (the walking skeleton — pierce every integration seam with one real-but-trivial vertical slice, deployed, with a contract generated from one source so types can't drift), wellspring (state architecture, the heart — classify every piece of state into the one bucket that owns it, minimize the source of truth and derive the rest, model hard interactions as explicit state machines, and wire data along the dependency graph not the component tree), seaworthy (build the unhappy path first — the loading/error/empty/edge states ARE the product, maintain the user's illusion of direct manipulation against an async failing machine, with accessibility and a performance budget built in), livery (the visual system — every visual value is a token derived from a system, never an ad-hoc literal: an oklch color-and-light model with a dark path, a type-and-spacing scale, depth and form from a single light model, and motion that earns its place with purpose, physics, and a reduced path — taste decides, the system enforces), trials (correctness — test behavior not structure so the suite is a net not a straitjacket, spend the budget where frontend bugs cluster via the testing trophy, mock only the network with a contract-true mock), lookout (delivery and observability — shipping is the start of the conversation with reality, RUM as psychophysics encoded as numbers, and the pre-launch objective-function ethics gate, because A/B testing is a gradient-descent optimizer that discovers manipulation as a local optimum with no one designing it), and bulwark (1-to-N — fight entropy by making the architecture self-enforcing: boundaries fossilized into lint, wrong abstractions pruned, the design system a living artifact, a steady state with no exit). Across all eight the agent writes the code, but the leverage migrates to the membrane between machine and mind — which boundary, whose source of truth, what causal story forms in the user's head, and whose interest the optimizer serves — the calls the agent cannot make. A separate un-gated navigator, pilot, routes a frontend task to the right entry stage — most frontend work isn't greenfield — or out to a sibling suite (engineering, distributed, quarry) when the real need is general code craft, distributed correctness, or library choice. Installs every skill under the /surface: prefix. Note: the gates are enforced by the `checklist` CLI, which installs separately — see the repository README.