design:os

#Write the soul from measurements, not from taste.

Blocked byA rule stated as preference, with nothing behind it to check.

design/soul.md is the project's declared visual stance, and every clause in it carries a measurement rather than a preference: a chroma reading, a line-height ratio held across two typefaces, a histogram of what the site's own sheets actually do. A rule with no evidence line does not ship.

That discipline caught its own violation once: the soul had already banned a second accent color, and the accent's literal value drifted anyway when the theme flipped from dark to light. The clause is still the rule; the drift is why it now cites its own evidence rather than asserting the color.

#A component exists when the registry says so.

Blocked byComponents tracked by memory and by folder, not by anything a script could read.

design/component-registry.json is the one place a component is declared to exist: not a folder of files, not a name someone remembers, a JSON array a script can read. The gate and the parity harness both walk it rather than the filesystem, so a component missing from the registry is a component the site cannot claim.

The registry is a promise, not a guarantee: declaring a kind in the type system is not the same as giving it somewhere to render, and that gap is this case's most literal open failure. A `specimen` artifact kind is declared in the type and still has no renderer: components/artifact/artifact-view.tsx has no branch for it, so the registry says it exists and the page draws nothing where it should.

#Parity is verified by a harness, never by eye.

Blocked byMatching a component to its reference meant a person looking and deciding.

`npm run ds:verify` resolves every registered component's rendered CSS against its measured reference and fails on a mismatched value (padding, stroke, radius) rather than waiting for someone to notice it in a screenshot. `npm run gate` runs the wider net beside it: route coverage, token sync, the metrics registry's own source-link contract.

A harness proves the shape it was told to check, and nothing outside that shape. That is this chapter's argument, and its own strongest evidence is what the harness did not catch: parity passed, and the interface audit still found the primary button's own focus indicator at 1.95:1 against its outer ring, short of the 3:1 an escalation trigger requires, unfixed as of this chapter shipping.

The same audit surfaced a different kind of miss on `.ds-tab`, rendered 67 by 32 pixels in the shell nav on every route: it clears WCAG 2.5.8's 24 by 24 baseline but falls under the 40 by 40 desktop target. That one was left as recorded, not fixed. Chapter one's own rule, that density earned through 2px-granular spacing is deliberate rather than accidental, argues directly against widening it: the harness has no way to tell a chosen trade-off from an unnoticed failure, so both still wait on a person to decide which this one is.

#This page is the evidence, and the evidence can fail.

Blocked byFour claims about this system, asked to be believed on the page's own word.

Four claims this site makes about itself are each backed by a test that runs on every change, not a sentence asking to be believed: no rendered number is a hand-typed literal, every route the gate lists still renders, every registered component still matches its reference, every metric still carries a source a reader can follow.

The focus-indicator failure named above is held to the same test discipline: a test goes red the moment it is fixed, forcing either a new open failure onto this page or the claim's own removal. A confession nobody can retire is decoration; this one can be retired, by fixing it.