Verify (look at it, don't just read it)

Verify (look at it, don't just read it)

Registry-first artifact boundary

When .styleseed/project.json and .styleseed/artifacts/index.json exist, resolve the requested artifact ID first, then read only .styleseed/bundles/<artifact-id>.md and .styleseed/manifests/<artifact-id>.json. Never fall back to the global legacy bundle for a registry project. Legacy projects may use .styleseed/effective-rules.md only when no registry exists.

Read .styleseed/effective-rules.md and .styleseed/manifest.json; invoke /ss-resolve or $ss-resolve first when they are missing or stale. Judge pixels against that compiled method. A lock value cannot excuse a core failure, and a recipe/profile cannot replace the output grammar.

/ss-score reads the code and scores it. But some of the worst "AI-made" tells never appear in source — they only exist in pixels: a hero that doesn't actually dominate, a lower third of dead whitespace, cramped cards, a web font that silently failed to load and fell back to Times, two colors that look like two accents once rendered, text that's unreadable on its real background. A human sees these in half a second; a code-reading gate misses all of them.

/ss-verify closes that gap: it renders the UI, screenshots it, and you look at the image — then score the same StyleSeed gate against what you see, fix, and re-render. This is the gate that most predicts whether a real user will say "this looks designed."

Run it as the final gate after /ss-score passes — code-clean is necessary but not sufficient; pixel-clean is the real bar.

When NOT to use

• Nothing renderable yet (pure logic/config, or a component with no host page) → use /ss-score.
• No way to render at all (no browser, no Playwright, headless blocked) → say so, fall back to /ss-score, and tell the user the visual gate was skipped. Never claim you verified visually if you didn't actually see a screenshot.
• A quick pre-commit pass → /ss-lint. /ss-verify is heavier (it boots a renderer).

Step 1 — Render it through the active adapter

For social-carousel, slide-deck, document-report, or single-frame, use the companion renderer and open every required exported frame/page at readable resolution. Verify dimensions, crop/safe zones, font availability, asset placement, and the export manifest. Do not force a browser workflow onto a PIL, slide, PDF, or image renderer.

For product-ui, get a real screenshot in priority order:

A. Running project (Next / Vite / etc.) — the normal case.