vision-verify — the visual gate

verify-build proves a change compiles and passes tests. It cannot prove the page looks right — code review reasons about JSX/CSS, it never sees the result. This skill closes that gap: render → screenshot → an independent visual grade against a rubric. It is the visual complement to verify-build, not a replacement — run both for UI-affecting work.

Proven 2026-07-05: caught a duplicate "Services" nav item on a live r1 site that unit tests, tsc, next build, AND two code reviews all missed — then confirmed the fix by re-screenshot. First bug on SF caught by seeing, not reasoning about code.

When to use

• After ANY UI-affecting change, before "done" — especially landing/site render (hero, nav, sections), the dashboard shell, or anything themed.
• To confirm a fix visually landed on a live/preview URL (the found → fix → confirm loop).

Steps

1. Get a public URL to the page — a deployed /w/<slug>, the <slug>.app.seldonframe.com subdomain, or a Vercel preview URL. It must be publicly reachable (the renderer fetches it). If you just pushed a fix, first confirm the deploy is live: curl -s https://app.seldonframe.com/api/version → the sha should be your commit (else wait for the deploy).

2. Render (from packages/crm), at desktop and — for anything responsive — mobile:

   node scripts/vision-shot.mjs <url> /tmp/vv-desktop.png 1280
   node scripts/vision-shot.mjs <url> /tmp/vv-mobile.png 390
   

   It cache-busts so a just-deployed change is captured fresh. Prints the saved path. (Set MICROLINK_API_KEY for higher rate limits; the free endpoint works without it, but can rate-limit on rapid retries — space them out.)

3. Grade — independent (maker ≠ checker), on haiku — PINNED. Dispatch the vision-grader agent (Agent tool, subagent_type: "vision-grader" — its definition in .claude/agents/vision-grader.md pins model: haiku; do NOT pass a model override) — it Reads the PNG and grades it against the goal + a rubric, returning { pass: boolean, gaps: string[] }. Read-a-PNG→verdict is haiku work; a real session ran 4 graders on sonnet (~218k tokens — the session's biggest line item) purely because the model was left to dispatch-time habit. The pin lives in the agent definition so it can't drift. (If haiku ever provably misses what sonnet catches — run 10 known-good + 10 known-bad screenshots — change the pin there, on evidence, not per-dispatch.) Do NOT let the code's author grade its own pixels — a fresh grader sees only the artifact + the rubric, with no stake in the maker's reasoning. For a quick self-check inline, Read the PNG yourself — but a real gate uses a separate grader. Prefer a before/after DIFF grade when a baseline exists: hand the grader both screenshots and ask "what changed — is the change the requested one, and did anything regress?" A visual diff is more sensitive to regressions (the duplicate-nav class) and less subjective than an absolute grade.

4. Act. Pass → done. Gaps → feed each gap back to the maker → re-render → re-grade until pass or a hard iteration cap (an objective stop, like /goal).

Rubric (adapt per surface)

Generic: renders with no broken images / empty sections; text is legible (contrast); nothing overlaps or overflows the viewport (no horizontal scroll); no duplicated nav/section elements; the specific change requested is visibly present; nothing is truncated mid-word in a jarring way.

Per-surface hints:

• Hero: headline hierarchy clear; subhead + CTAs legible; any lead-form-in-hero renders; a set background sits BEHIND text with a legibility veil (never washing out the copy).
• Nav: exactly one of each item (the duplicate-"Services" class of bug); wordmark + phone/CTA present.
• Pricing / tables: columns aligned; numbers tabular; no clipped cells.
• Dashboard shell: no sideways scroll; the summary reads before the detail.

Notes

• The Chrome-MCP screenshot path is unreliable here (CDP clip.scale + backgrounded-tab 0-viewport) — use vision-shot.mjs.
• Product version (next build): the same render+grade engine, server-side, becomes SeldonChat's "confirm the edit looks right before I say done" and a gate in the site-generation pipeline — the never-lies pillar made mechanical. Spec: docs/superpowers/specs/2026-07-05-vision-verify-spike.md.