The Critic Loop

One cycle = BUILD (a separate session, or skipped) → CRITIC (this skill) → MEMO → deltas handed to the next build.

Serve the built output locally (a static file server on a kernel-picked port, bound to loopback) and grade the served site, never the source intent. A headless browser rig for screenshots and measurement lives in the project’s own dependencies; nothing here reaches the network. The loop never deploys — publishing belongs to a human.

TRIGGER

Invoke when asked for a critic pass, a grade, or the next loop cycle. Do not invoke mid-build: grade only a committed, built, clean tree, and record the commit under test on the sheet.

THE SEVEN AREAS, 0–5 each

1. FIRST 30 SECONDS — the actual first screenful, cold, at a desktop and a phone viewport: what is this, who made it, why keep reading.
2. THE CLAIM — sharp, specific, unpasteable by any other project; generic marketing phrasing scores 1.
3. THE PROOF — the site SHOWS its claims operating: inspectable receipts, captured refusals, reconciling numbers. A verification pitch on faith = 0.
4. VISUAL CRAFT — a design language executed: type scale, state-only color, rhythm, considered interactive states. Ruled-in design choices are critiqued on their execution, never on their existence. (AMENDMENT A5.) For any canvas or SVG figure, measure the effective ON-SCREEN px of its smallest rendered label at both viewports — drawn size × (CSS width ÷ internal coordinate width). A scaled figure’s type scale is not its source type scale, and a figure that renders smaller on desktop than on phone is a defect on its face.
5. PHONE — one-handed at a phone width: measured tap targets (44px guideline, 24px WCAG floor), overflow on every page, menu open/dismiss, open-state usability. (AMENDMENT A4.) Tap-target measurement covers EVERY route in the declared route list, not a sample. A delta predicted to move PHONE must state the measured worst target across ALL routes, not only the routes the previous pass happened to shoot.
6. HONESTY — cross-check every number that appears twice; dates vs “now”; labels vs delivery. One confident overstatement caps the area at 2. Honesty-at-own-expense is signal; judge its legibility. (AMENDMENT A1.) A 5 additionally requires that every gate currently REFUSING is on the site’s own record. Honesty is graded on the completeness of the record, not only the candour of what is shown; an unshown live refusal caps the area at 4.
7. PERFORMANCE — numbers only: cold bytes + requests per page, split by type, largest asset, total built size. Set a bar and hold it (e.g. homepage under 300KB and under 15 requests, fonts included).

HARD CONDITIONS (non-negotiable)

• Findings are proven BY MUTATION: to claim an element causes a problem, demonstrate the delta (toggle it, measure both states) or mark the finding PLAUSIBLE, never CONFIRMED.
• TESTS are in scope, not just code: freshness assertions and refusal drills are graded surfaces — a reddened pin or a drill that no longer fires is a finding.
• A 5 requires naming what would have made it a 4 and why it does not apply.
• NEVER raise a grade to end a loop — an inflated 5 is the only way this job fails.
• Screenshots or it is theater: every visual verdict cites an image file the grader actually viewed, named <dir>/area<N>-<page>-<viewport>[-state].png.
• Every area emits a named falsifiable DELTA that names a FILE OR ELEMENT, never a quality. (“Recrop the portrait assets to square” is a delta; “improve craft” is not.) Each delta carries an owner: build-movable / content-movable / BLOCKED-ON-HUMAN.

THE FOUR LOOP RULES

Three consecutive passes moved First-30s, Craft and Phone by exactly zero. The critique was honest and the grades were probably right; the loop was unactionable. These four rules exist to make the loop move, and they apply from cycle one — they are not aspirations to grow into.

A. FIRE CRITICS ONLY WHERE WORK CHANGED. Full critique on the areas this cycle actually touched; every other area gets the CHEAP REGRESSION CHECK (below). Reading the diff first is part of the job — a critic who does not know what changed cannot target anything.

B. EVERY DELTA NAMES A FILE OR AN ELEMENT. Not a quality, not a feeling, not a direction. “Improve hierarchy” is not a delta. “The hero receipt on the home page: replace the shell command with a link to the machine-readable status file” is. A delta that cannot be written this way is not yet understood well enough to hand to a builder, and saying so is a better outcome than dressing it up.

(AMENDMENT A2.) A delta predicted to move FIRST 30 SECONDS must state the element’s expected top offset in px at both graded viewports, and must predict NO first-30s move where that offset exceeds the fold. DOM position is not fold position.

(AMENDMENT A3.) A delta that names a MEANS and a TARGET must have had the means measured against the target before it is issued. One pass issued a delta naming both — “cut the lede to ≤3 lines” AND “so the figure clears the fold by ≥300px” — and the two did not meet. Measured: the cut was executed exactly as written and moved the figure 753→659px on desktop (clearing 241) and 770→638px on phone (clearing 206). Reaching ≥300px at BOTH viewports needed the lede down to roughly 39 characters — one short line, which is a caption, not a lede. The rest of the distance was not the lede’s to give: 201px and 273px sat between the lede and the figure and belonged to the figure’s own preamble. So: measure the means against the target, or issue two deltas and let the builder report where the first one lands. A means-plus-target delta that was never arithmetic-checked spends a full cycle to discover subtraction.

C. THE CRITIC PREDICTS, AND IS SCORED ON IT. Every delta is logged with a PREDICTED move before the next build runs, and the next graded pass fills in the ACTUAL move. Report prediction hit-rate as a NUMBER on every sheet. The sharp end: a delta that was executed and did NOT move its grade is a defect in the RUBRIC, not in the builder — the rubric asked for the wrong thing, so amend the line that generated the failed prediction and record the amendment. This is the only mechanism that improves the loop rather than the site.

(AMENDMENT A6.) Two deltas predicting a move in the SAME area in one cycle are logged as ONE joint prediction. A delta whose prediction is “no move” must additionally name the MECHANISM to be measured (a request list, a byte count, a rendered box), because a null result is unfalsifiable from an area grade another delta also moved.

(AMENDMENT A7.) Before issuing a delta, NAME THE BINDING CONSTRAINT on that area and state why this delta relieves it. A delta that fixes a real defect which is not the binding constraint predicts NO MOVE, and says so. One pass is the whole argument: six deltas were executed faithfully, six fixed exactly what they named, and six moved nothing — because each addressed a real defect that was not the thing holding its area down. Two of them fixed one-pixel occlusions while the figure itself rendered at 76% scale. Another fixed a wordmark’s hit box while 34 sub-WCAG targets sat on a page that pass never opened. A delta that cannot name what is actually binding is a guess with a file path attached, and the loop has priced that at a 44% hit-rate.

D. CLASSIFY EVERY AREA BEFORE SPENDING A TURN ON IT.

• build-movable — a build session can move it. Spend turns here.
• content-movable — needs writing or a decision about what to say, not code.
• BLOCKED-ON-HUMAN — capped until a human ruling lands.

Never spend a build turn on the last two. Say what the cap is and move on.

FURTHER AMENDMENTS — each forced by rule C

(These lived only in the sheets that forced them until an audit found that several had been absent from this file for two full cycles: the loop ran its own two-declarations defect on its own rubric, and every pass after that point graded against a file that did not contain the rules it was applying. An amendment that is not copied back into this file did not happen.)

A8 — text edits move things in quanta of line-height, or not at all. (Generated by A2.) A predicted offset following a TEXT-LENGTH change must be derived as ⌈chars ÷ measured chars-per-line⌉ × measured line-height at each viewport, and quoted as a LINE COUNT first, px second. A prediction not expressible as an integer number of lines at both viewports is rejected before the build runs. Measured: cutting 69 characters moved the target 0.0px on desktop (3 lines → 3 lines) and 23.1px on phone (6 → 5 lines).

A9 — measure the scale where the coordinate space changes, and name the unit of a floor. (Generated by A5.) A figure whose internal coordinate width changes at a breakpoint must have its effective on-screen label px measured at that breakpoint from BOTH sides and at the worst width in each layout’s range — not only at the two graded viewports — and the discontinuity reported as a number. And: a floor expressed in DRAWN units is not a floor on rendered size. A delta claiming a legibility floor must state the unit and the scale it survives.

A10 — from REFUSING to WITHHELD. (Generated by A1.) A1 extends from REFUSING to WITHHELD. Every control holding back a capability the site claims — whether it exits nonzero, or exits clean with the capability unarmed — belongs on the record. A block that has never fired is the class most easily left off a record, and is worth more on it than one that has already cleared.

A11 — a “sole blocker” is a claim about the whole area, and a multi-delta pass grades against its combined end state. (Generated by A7.) “Sole blocker” must be backed by a re-run of that area’s full cross-check list at the graded commit, not by the absence of other findings last pass. And where a pass ships several deltas, each area’s prediction is scored against the pass’s COMBINED end state — deltas routinely create each other’s blockers, and a per-delta prediction that ignores its siblings is scoring a site that never existed.

A12 — a scale change must predict its containment cost, and “reusing an idiom” must be measured on both elements. (Generated by A9.) A delta that changes a figure’s rendered scale must predict and measure the CONTAINMENT consequence at the same widths — how much of the figure leaves the box, and what at-rest affordance signals it. A legibility gain that hides content is a trade, and must be logged with both numbers, not one. Corollary: when a delta claims to reuse an existing idiom, the reuse is verified by MEASURING the idiom’s affordance on both elements.

A13 — the unit of record completeness is the EMITTER’S VOCABULARY. (Generated by A10.) When a delta makes a record legible, completeness is measured against every token the WRITER can emit — grep the writer, not the log — not against the states the delta chose to handle. State, per token, what the reader is shown. A record renderer is complete when every emittable token has a defined rendering, including a defined refusal to interpret an unknown one. Measured: a delta gave all four tokens of one outcome family distinct correct copy, while the writer emitted six outcome tokens; the three outside that family fell into a branch asserting they had stopped at the human-held gate, which is false for a failure logged after the human already said yes.

A14 — A2 extends to DISPLACEMENT: the fold is a fixed budget. (Generated by A2.) A delta that inserts an element into a first screenful must state, for both viewports, every element currently above the fold that the insertion pushes below it, and net the loss against the gain before predicting a move. An insertion is a trade, and a first-30s prediction that names only what arrives is scoring half the ledger. Measured: a 39px gloss line pushed a footer portrait from 26.5px above the fold on phone to 16.5px below it — spending a gain the previous pass had explicitly credited.

A15 — a tap target is not a touch test. (Generated by A4.) A4 made tap-target GEOMETRY exhaustive across routes, and PHONE reached 5 on that basis and held it for three passes, wrongly. Geometry measures whether a finger can HIT something; it says nothing about whether the page RESPONDS to the two gestures a phone actually has. A PHONE grade of 4 or 5 now additionally requires, on every route carrying a canvas, an overflow region, or a non-passive listener: a synthesized VERTICAL drag whose ΔscrollY is compared against an inert control element on the same page, and a synthesized HORIZONTAL drag on every scrollable region — both deltas reported as numbers. A region whose at-rest affordance cannot be operated by the gesture it advertises is a DEAD AFFORDANCE and caps PHONE at 3 regardless of tap-target geometry. Measured: one page’s canvas returned 0px against a control’s 201px, and its stage panned 0 of 46px, on a page graded 5 twice — while the fade and the scroll cue built to survive its clip were both correct and both unreachable by touch. Corollary to A12: a containment cost measured at two wide breakpoints had its floor then applied globally. At the phone width the same rule yielded 0.000px of legibility gain for 10.27% of the composition. A trade must be re-measured at every width where the rule applies, not only at the width that motivated it.

CYCLE CADENCE

Run cycles continuously until the human says stop. Between cycles emit a ONE-SCREEN delta memo, nothing longer: score by area, what moved, what did not, prediction hit-rate as a number, and the next deltas with owners.

KEY LEARNINGS (seeded from a real record)

• The flat-pass anatomy: the total held while honesty rose +1 and performance fell −1 — the loss was SELF-INFLICTED collateral (an unoptimized image displayed at a fraction of its size), not targeted work. Totals hide trades; read areas, not sums.
• The private-source ceiling: 4 of 7 critics in two consecutive graded passes named the same blocker — every receipt bottomed out in a source only the operator could read. Claim and Proof plateau at 3–4 until a human rules on a publicly checkable anchor. Do not spend build turns there; mark BLOCKED-ON-HUMAN.
• Three passes stuck at 3 on First-30s, Craft, and Phone: generic “polish” deltas do not move them; only element-named deltas have ever moved an area.
• Cold critics find real defects the builder cannot see (an impossible weekday, a generation timestamp that postdates its own build) — never let the builder grade its own pass.
• A dead-end receipt is worse than no receipt: it converts a reader who came to verify into a reader who caught you bluffing. Where the evidence cannot travel, LABEL it — an explicitly welded pane reads as honesty rather than absence.
• Two declarations of one fact will drift, and the drift is invisible because each file reads correctly alone (a robots file versus a response header; a pruned title versus the commit subject it re-derives from). When a defect lives BETWEEN two files, the fix is a gate that refuses disagreement, not a careful edit.
• A GREP IS NOT A FINDING. A pattern match cannot tell a receipt invitation the reader cannot accept from donated source code the page exists to give away. One surviving hit for a shell command turned out to be a line inside a donated code sample — the reader’s own copy-this snippet. “Converting it to the attestation idiom” would have broken a working sample to satisfy a pattern match. The structural distinction is usually already in the markup: exclude the donated-code figure class before scanning. Findings survive at the level of what a string DOES, not what it matches.

LOOP-IMPROVE (append-only log, in this file, after every cycle)

Format: | delta | executed? | predicted move | actual move |

After each graded pass, append one row per prior-cycle delta and compute the hit-rate. When prediction accuracy over the trailing five rows drops below 3/5, amend the rubric line that generated the failed predictions and note the amendment here. The rubric improves on measured error, never on taste.

Sheets live in a critic-sheet directory inside the site’s own repo. A prediction nobody can look up is a recollection, so the sheet has to survive the session that wrote it — an early pass had to reconstruct its own previous-grade column because the sheets had not been kept.

delta	executed?	predicted move	actual move
(start your log here — one row per delta, appended after each graded pass)

COST DISCIPLINE

• CHEAP REGRESSION CHECK (every untargeted area, every cycle): re-measure its last-pass numbers (bytes, requests, tap targets, overflow, reconciling counts) and re-shoot its two anchor screenshots. Nothing else. This check exists because one pass’s Performance loss was collateral damage from untargeted work — it is the tripwire for exactly that.
• Cycle cap: one graded pass per invocation; at most 2 build turns between grades; stop and report rather than exceed the cap.
• Grading runs off the screenshot set when one is provided — re-shoot only what is missing or stale (commit mismatch).

SHEET FORMAT (the memo)

Grid: seven areas × (prev, new, Δ) + the commit under test + screenshot directory + shot count. Each area carries its owner class (rule D). The two findings that matter most, one line each, with evidence. Deltas with owners and PREDICTED moves (rule C). Prediction hit-rate as a number. An UNMEASURED list. Never a verdict without its artifact.