deterministic-design

name	deterministic-design
description	Deterministic, measurable design verification — render the UI and PROVE it's balanced and usable instead of trusting the model's eye. Layout audit (centroid / optical-center / pixel-oracle balance via deterministic math, annotated screenshot) + a vision-judged Nielsen usability audit by a SEPARATE fresh-eyes judge. Use to catch AI-generated UI that "looks off", is misaligned / centered-mush, or fails usability — the measurement+judgment layer that token-and-taste design skills (including the default) don't have.
author	Conner K Ward

deterministic-design

Thesis: determinism beats AI randomness. A model can't trust its own eye on layout — so don't. Render the UI and measure it.

Two sub-skills (load as needed):

• design-spatial — deterministic layout audit: explicit grid
  • 8-pt spacing, and layout-audit.js computes centroid / optical-center / pixel-oracle balance and draws an annotated screenshot. Numbers, not vibes. Plus a render-then- critique vision loop.
• design-ux — usability audit: scores the rendered UI against Nielsen's 10 + interaction heuristics via a SEPARATE fresh-eyes judge → prioritized fix list.

This improves existing design skills (including the default Anthropic one) by adding the layer they lack — it doesn't just advise on taste, it renders, measures, and judges the output. Composable with any design skill.

In central this lives as a subdir of ckw-design; it publishes separately as deterministic-design-skill (its own distribution) via publish-skill. One of the two flagship narratives — the determinism one; its sibling is human-in-the-loop (lookdev).