Surface charter

Surface Charter

Failure mode

Prevent vague adjectives, framework defaults, and session-local taste from becoming the product's unspoken design authority. Establish a durable surface constitution without prescribing a house style.

Governing principle

Define the product's posture, tensions, anti-goals, signature traits, grammars, permitted variance, and identity-bearing exceptions before asking an agent to make it look or feel "better."

Authority

1. Read repository instructions and existing product, design, content, accessibility, and history artifacts before proposing a format.
2. Treat an established local constitution or equivalent as authoritative. Extend it in its own vocabulary when practical.
3. Label observed implementation facts, inferred intent, and machine proposals separately. Leave operator choices pending until the operator supplies them.
4. Apply document authority to every nested control. A locked value inside a machine_proposed constitution is a proposed comparison constraint, not an operator-approved lock.
5. Keep the portable discipline here; keep the actual product constitution in the product repository.

Control sequence

1. Name the posture. Capture audience relationship, metaphors, tensions, anti-goals, signature traits, and rejected generic patterns. Mark unsupported rationales unknown.
2. Describe each grammar. Specify visual, interaction, content, state, and responsive behavior with operational consequences. Describe responsive transformations, not breakpoints alone.
3. Set independent controls. Assign fidelity by surface dimension and autonomy plus review units at macro, meso, and micro scales. Never collapse these into one "creative freedom" setting.
4. Decompose references. Record what to borrow, reject, transfer, and leave product-specific; declare the synthesis target. Treat anti-references as constraints, not inverted templates.
5. Concentrate identity. Allocate high, medium, and conventional identity load. Preserve useful conventions where differentiation adds no value.
6. Classify irregularities. Distinguish drift, inconsistency, intentional exception, and signature asymmetry. Record a reason and authority for every deliberate rule break.
7. Return decisions. Present consequential unresolved options, honest tradeoffs, and any machine recommendation. Do not fill operator choice, taste, approval, or verdict fields.
8. Write minimal artifacts. Prefer a parseable surface.yaml (or local equivalent) plus a concise SURFACE.md that routes humans to the decisions and high-identity areas. Do not duplicate recoverable fields.

Hard boundaries

• Do not encode one preferred aesthetic, density, product metaphor, component geometry, or voice.
• Do not imitate a whole reference product or let a component library silently become the product identity.
• Do not present machine-proposed posture or exceptions as operator-approved.
• Do not treat novelty as identity or force custom treatment into conventional utility controls.
• Do not let narrow layouts merely stack desktop regions or make essential actions disappear.
• Do not erase unexplained history by inventing a plausible rationale; mark it unknown and route the decision.

Mechanics

• Read surface-constitution-format.md when creating, validating, or synchronizing constitution artifacts.
• Read reference-decomposition.md when references, anti-references, or imitation risk are involved.
• Read distinctiveness-and-exceptions.md when allocating identity load or classifying divergence from a rule.
• Validate machine-readable artifacts against schemas/surface-constitution.schema.json when the repository provides it.

Optional composition

This skill is complete on its own. If installed, use specimen-first when no direction has earned systematization, voicekeeper for detailed language control, statewright for workflow-level state coverage, surface-genealogy for irreducible design history, and surface-witness for independent convergence review. Route consequential operator choices through an available decision-handoff discipline, but never require one.