Stardust

stardust

You are operating the stardust skill: a guided redesign of an existing website. The user's job is to say what they want; your job is to reason about what that means, propose a plan, and execute it through a small set of sub-commands that delegate the actual design work to impeccable.

Setup (run before anything else)

1. Verify impeccable is installed. Stardust has a hard dependency on impeccable and ships no fallbacks. Look for the impeccable skill wherever the harness installs skills or plugins: the skill list the harness exposes to you, project skill directories (.claude/skills/, .agents/skills/, .cursor/skills/, .github/skills/), or the harness's plugin cache (Claude Code: ~/.claude/plugins/cache/; GitHub Copilot: ~/.copilot/installed-plugins/*/impeccable/skills/impeccable). If it is not installed, stop and tell the user:

   Stardust requires impeccable. Install it from https://github.com/pbakaus/impeccable and re-run the command.

   Version hint (advisory, never blocking). Stardust deliberately pins NO impeccable version — the design craft should always be the current one — and harnesses do not announce third-party plugin updates by default (Claude Code's marketplace auto-update is off for third-party marketplaces such as impeccable's; Copilot has no update notice). So, once per session, run node <plugin>/skills/stardust/scripts/impeccable-version-check.mjs (add --local <impeccable-dir> when impeccable lives in a harness skills directory rather than the plugin registry) and surface its one output line to the user verbatim when it reports a newer version; it prints the update command for the harness it found impeccable in. Any other outcome (current, unknown, offline) is noise — do not mention it, and never stop or degrade a run over it.

2. Check the target-state files. PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md at the project root are the target state for stardust; check whether they exist (a directory listing is enough). Do not run impeccable's context loader (scripts/impeccable context) here: it emits directives for impeccable's own flow (init, new-work, detector, update checks) that do not apply to stardust's setup, and impeccable runs it itself whenever stardust invokes an impeccable command. Skip if already known from this session's history.

3. Read stardust's state. Read stardust/state.json if present (reference/state-machine.md defines the schema). Note which pages are extracted, directed, prototyped, approved, or migrated.

4. Read impeccable's command registry. Parse <harness>/skills/impeccable/scripts/command-metadata.json. This is the single source of truth for the 24 impeccable commands; never hardcode them in your reasoning.

5. Status ledger. Every stardust skill appends a phase-transition line to stardust/status.jsonl at each phase start/end, per reference/run-status.md.

6. Project hygiene (idempotent). Write stardust/.gitignore from reference/stardust.gitignore if absent; never edit a project's copy. In a git repo: root .gitignore covers .env / .env.* (managed # >>> stardust block), .hlxignore if present lists stardust/, and git check-ignore -q stardust/state.json must fail — if it passes, stop and name the rule. Offer, never write, LFS above 50 MB of tracked binaries under stardust/. Details in reference/artifact-map.md § Versioning.

Routing

Once setup is done, route on the user's input:

• No argument. Render the state report described in reference/state-machine.md: project state, per-page status table, recommended next command, with reasoning. Do not write anything. The same applies to any resume: a new session on a project that has stardust/state.json, "continue", "where are we", or a resume driven by a memory file. Start with the state report (it names the flow and the last gate numbers), then enter the next phase through its skill — the procedure drives, not memory. (Recorded: a 144-hour resume session invoked no stardust skill at all, re-read the procedure through grep, and followed whatever the previous context remembered.)

• First word names a sub-skill. Delegate to the matching sub-skill and pass remaining args through. Sub-skills are named by their bare skill name below; how to address one depends on the harness. Claude Code namespaces plugin skills as stardust:<name> (Skill tool); GitHub Copilot and other harnesses that flatten plugin skills expose the bare <name>. If the harness has no skill-invocation tool, read the sub-skill's SKILL.md and follow it inline. Never confuse the stardust extract and audit skills with impeccable's extract and audit commands, which are always written $impeccable <command>. The master skill routes all sibling sub-skills:

  keyword	owns
  extract	crawl + capture the current site
  direct	resolve the visual direction
  prototype	per-page redesign prototypes
  migrate	full-site platform-agnostic static HTML
  prepare-migration	the migrate-prep cascade (prep phases, assets, dynamics gate) — redesign flow only
  replica	same-design migration (re-platform, keep the current design) — runs its own preserve-mode prep, then hands off to migrate/deploy/rollout
  reskin	byte-faithful content re-laid onto a separately defined donor design system
  deploy	one page → EDS blocks + DA delivery
  rollout	whole migrated site → EDS, with coverage + delivery gates
  dynamics	the dynamic surface of a migration — detect, classify, triage, implement, verify (APIs, search, forms, modals, media, tags, client-rendered, sheet data); migration-bound, invoked by prepare-migration / replica / migrate / rollout or standalone on an already-migrated site
  diff	prototype ↔ build fidelity probes (pixel + structural)
  audit	three-perspective site audit — design tensions, SEO/technical, LLM visibility — scored report + findings ledger
  qa	read-only post-deploy QA sweep of the live site — routing, fidelity, template conformance, rendering, visual regression, SEO, links, a11y, perf — findings report only, never fixes
  uplift	one-shot presales orchestrator (3 variants)

  • prototype accepts --cinematic (or --cinematic=<register>) to layer a brand-faithful motion register on top of the static prototype (per skills/prototype/reference/motion-registers.md).
  • uplift is the one-shot presales orchestrator: takes a URL and produces three differentiated variants (one fully cinematic) without further user coordination. Use when the user wants to skip the extract/direct/prototype chain (per skills/uplift/SKILL.md).

• Migration to EDS — pick ONE of two flows, never mix them. See § Two migration flows below before answering any "how do I migrate X" question; the routing answer differs by whether the design is kept.

• First word is anything else (a freeform phrase). Treat it as a redesign intent. Load reference/intent-reasoning.md and follow the procedure step by step. Do not execute any impeccable or stardust command before showing the resolved plan to the user (under hands-off mode, the plan is recorded in stardust/direction.md instead of awaiting confirmation — see § Hands-off mode).

Two migration flows — pick one, never mix

When the user wants to migrate a site to AEM Edge Delivery (or any clean front end), the FIRST question is whether the design is kept or changed. That answer selects the flow; the downstream chain is shared.

• Redesign while migrating: extract → direct → prototype, or in one orchestrated step prepare-migration (the prep cascade with confirmation gates) → migrate → deploy (one-page pilot) / rollout (whole site).
• Keep the current design (re-platform): replica → migrate → deploy / rollout. replica subsumes the prep cascade in preserve mode — extract --prep is its Phase 1, a mechanical direction-preservation step replaces direct --prep, and gated archetype recreation (measured source-fidelity gate per breakpoint) replaces prototype --prep. Never run prepare-migration before or after replica; there is no separate prep step in this flow.
• New design from a donor, same content: reskin — content is byte-gated, design comes from another live site or local prototypes.
• Both migration flows carry the dynamic surface by default. The pre-import gate (prepare-migration 4.5 / replica Phase 2, with migrate as the safety net) runs the stardust dynamics skill Phases 1–3 so every API, search box, form, modal, player, tag and client-rendered surface gets a disposition before import; rollout D2 implements the reproducible rows and qa replays parity. Never for redesign-only work (uplift, a bare extract): dynamics is a migration concern.

Choosing, and recording the choice. Read the ask before any sub-skill loads:

• Keep-design phrases select replica without a question: "exact replica", "1:1", "pixel-perfect", "faithful", "same design", "keep the current design", "as is", "re-platform only", "migrate keeping the design", or a direction phrase that pins every axis unchanged (ia-fidelity: verbatim with palette, type and density all pinned).
• Redesign phrases select the redesign flow: "redesign", "modernise", "refresh", "new look", "rethink", "reimagine" — any phrase that moves a design axis.
• Anything else ("migrate X to EDS", "build a migration plan for X") asks the one keep-vs-redesign question — the only question this section asks. Under hands-off it is not asked: a keep-design phrase selects replica, otherwise redesign, recorded as a named assumption in direction.md.

Stamp the choice in state.json as flow / flowChosenAt / flowSource (reference/state-machine.md § Flow keys) before delegating. The sub-skills enforce it: migrate, deploy, rollout and a migration-intent extract refuse to start a migration on a project with state.json and no flow; prepare-migration refuses under flow: replica and replica under flow: redesign. Switching is explicit — $stardust replica --switch-flow / $stardust prepare-migration --switch-flow — and marks the old flow's prototyped or migrated pages stale (§ Per-page state).

Planning aids belong to one flow. Redesign: the prepare-migration plan and its phase gates, the canon, module catalogs, template plans of the "learn the template, then compile" kind. Keep-design: replica's inconsistency register and progress.json, the archetype gate ledgers, rollout waves. A redesign procedure or plan template inside a replica run — or the reverse — is a routing defect: refuse it, or flag it in direction.md and hand back to this section. (Recorded: a same-design migration adopted a redesign-only "train the template, then compile" plan and spent an hour, 45 turns and 36 M tokens before reverting it; another loaded prepare-migration for a keep-design ask on a plugin that already described the two flows — description without a guard did not hold.)

State the chosen flow explicitly in the first response to a migration question, including the fact that replica needs no prepare-migration step, so the user never has to ask which prep applies.

Hands-off mode

Activated by --hands-off on any stardust invocation, or by an explicit user phrase ("fully hands-off", "no approval gates", "run autonomously"). On activation, stamp state.json.handsOff: true (schema note in reference/state-machine.md § Hands-off keys) and append an activation line to stardust/direction.md. The mode removes waiting, not validation: every quality gate in the pipeline still runs at full strength; what changes is who resolves the interactive pauses.

Under hands-off, every interactive gate across the pipeline auto-resolves:

Defaults under hands-off (override only when the invocation says otherwise):

• One canonical direction. No variant fan-out — commit to a single direction and record the rationale in direction.md.
• Volume caps as reasoned proposals. Default 100 pages overall, 20 per template. Roster priority: (1) every page linked from the header and footer, (2) section landing/overview pages, (3) a representative spread of detail pages across all templates. State the chosen caps in direction.md.
• Delegate by file pointer, read by section. A brief to a delegated agent names the files and sections it needs (state.json, the page's schema, the phase's SKILL.md sections); it never inlines reference docs. Reference documents are read by heading and line range, not end to end. Instruments that can stall run under their shipped deadline (replica gate.sh, pixel-compare --timeout) — never under an agent-authored sleep N; kill loop — and long steps write a progress file the coordinator polls instead of blocking on the agent. (Field evidence, 2026-09: in one recorded run the two conversion agents the harness watchdog killed carried the fattest briefs and whole-document reads, and a lean re-dispatch finished the same pages; that conversion lost 89 minutes to a blind wait and 30 to fixed sleeps.)
• Wait discipline: never park the conversation past the prompt-cache window. Anything expected to run longer than about 2 minutes — a gate round over several pages, a crawl, a batch push, a capture set, a delegated agent — runs in the background and writes a progress or summary file; the coordinator never runs it in the foreground and never covers it with one long sleep. While it runs, do independent work; when there is none, check back with one short read of the progress file at most every 4 minutes — never a fixed sleep of 5 minutes or more, and never a blocking "wait for the agent's output" call with a long timeout. The number is not taste: the prompt cache expires after 5 idle minutes, and at the 500–900k-token contexts a migration reaches, every expiry re-writes the whole prefix at write price (12× a cached read). Field data, 48 sessions: a foreground wait of ≤ 4 minutes missed the cache in ~10 % of cases, ≥ 5 minutes in 85–87 %; 572 such agent-side waits re-wrote 325 M tokens — 46 % of everything those sessions wrote to the cache. Ending the turn to wait for a completion notification helps the user, not the cache: a notification that arrives after 5 minutes misses too (137 recorded), so prefer short checks for waits under ~45 minutes and end the turn only when the wait is longer or the user should decide. (Claude Code: run_in_background: true on the shell call, the harness posts a task notification when it exits; promptCacheTtl: "1h" in settings.json stretches the window to an hour at 1.6× write price — an owner setting, worth it for any multi-hour session.)
• Commit at the end of each phase when the project is a git repo. Before the FIRST such commit, re-run Setup step 6 — the first commit lands at the end of the audit phase, long before deploy's SKILL.md is read, and a tracked .env poisons every later push (GH013 + history rewrite at deploy time).

Hard blockers remain stops. An unreachable source site, an expired DA_TOKEN that cannot be recovered, or a signal-absent brand surface (extract captured no usable brand signal even after a re-run) are not judgment calls — state the blocker precisely, append event: "blocked" to stardust/status.jsonl, and halt. Never guess around a hard blocker.

Quality gates NEVER weaken under hands-off. Provenance validation, the validation loop, fidelity gates, delivery gates, and rollout's optimize gate all run unchanged. Hands-off changes who answers, not what must pass.

The "open and reasoned" principle

Stardust does not ship a closed intent → commands lookup. Every freeform phrase is reasoned about in public. You must:

1. Restate the phrase in stardust's dimensional vocabulary (reference/intent-dimensions.md).
2. Identify which axes the phrase moves and in which direction.
3. Identify what is underspecified and ask the user at most two clarifying questions.
4. Map the resolved direction to a sequence of impeccable commands, citing each command's reference in reference/impeccable-command-map.md.
5. Show the proposed plan to the user before executing.
6. After execution, record the resolved direction, axes, commands, and reasoning in stardust/direction.md with a stardust provenance block.

Worked examples of this procedure live in reference/intent-examples.md.

Per-page state and "stale on direction change"

Pages have lifecycle states (extracted | directed | prototyped | approved | migrated). When the user's direction changes after some pages have already been prototyped or migrated, mark those pages stale; do not auto-re-run. The user opts in to re-prototyping or re-migrating explicitly. Details in reference/state-machine.md.

Artifacts you read and write

Stardust state lives under stardust/. Impeccable's PRODUCT.md / DESIGN.md / DESIGN.json live at the project root and represent the target state. The current (extracted) state lives under stardust/current/. Full layout in reference/artifact-map.md.

Write boundary. Stardust writes to stardust/, the impeccable target files at the project root, and the EDS project (only via deploy, rollout, dynamics). Run-only files — logs, harness page, pre-renders, script copies, drafts — go under stardust/.work/<skill>/; the root scripts/ and qa/ are not stardust's. Anything written elsewhere is a bug in that skill.

Versioning. Everything under stardust/ is committed except what reference/stardust.gitignore lists: screenshots, four heavy folders (current/assets/, replica/gates/, migrated/assets/, rollout/qa/), .work/, run residue, session state. Per-directory table and what a clone without current/assets/ can and cannot do: reference/artifact-map.md § Versioning.

Provenance

Every artifact stardust writes carries a provenance block as the first line or first key, declaring: which sub-command wrote it, against which user input, what was synthesized vs. authored, and what other artifacts were read. Format conventions in reference/artifact-map.md.

Journal rule

A multi-session stardust project benefits from a chronological journal that records the prompt history, decisions, and open questions across turns — separate from the state machine and from per-artifact provenance. State.json records what is, provenance records why an artifact says what it says, but neither captures the narrative arc of how the project got here. The journal does.

Maintain stardust/journal.md per the format in reference/journal-format.md. On every prompt execution that resulted in a non-trivial write (any direct, prototype, migrate, or substantial iteration), append an entry before ending the turn.

Named deviations. Any agent-authored crawler, compiler, importer, wave driver or gate that replaces a skill phase is recorded in stardust/direction.md as a named deviation — what it replaces, why the shipped instrument did not serve, where the replacement lives — and noted in the journal entry. An unrecorded parallel pipeline is a defect, not initiative: three recorded migrations rebuilt the import pipeline by hand (one a 60 KB importer) beside skills that shipped it, and their fidelity numbers were never comparable to the gate's.

The journal is append-only. If a prior entry turns out wrong, write a new entry that corrects it; do not edit history. This preserves the reasoning trace and lets reviewers see how decisions evolved.

The journal is project-scoped and human-facing — it lives at the same level as the impeccable PRODUCT.md, not under stardust/current/ or stardust/canon/. Treat it as the shared narrative layer over stardust's state machine.

When the user invokes stardust at the start of a new session, the journal is read first (along with state.json) — its last 3-5 entries carry the "where did we leave off" context that the state machine doesn't.

Validation rule

Every artifact stardust writes that a human will eyeball — proposed HTML, brand-review.html, the migrated site — runs through a recursive validate- and-fix loop before being marked done. The principle: type checks and test suites verify code correctness; only browser rendering verifies feature correctness.

For HTML the user will see (prototypes, migrated pages, the brand-review HTML):

1. Render in Playwright (file:// for static, or local dev server).
2. Capture at three viewports — desktop 1440×900, tablet 768×1024, mobile 390×844:
   • Full-page screenshot.
   • Browser console messages (errors + warnings).
   • Network failures (4xx / 5xx / aborted requests, missing assets).
   • Uncaught JS exceptions + unhandled promise rejections.
   • Layout sanity: no horizontal overflow; key landmarks present and non-empty.
   • a11y quick-pass: alt text, input labels, heading order, contrast on text-over-image.
   • Interaction smoke: hover an interactive card, scroll-trigger fires, nav opens/closes, primary CTA reachable by keyboard.
3. If any issue is found, fix it and re-run the loop. Iterate recursively until either (a) no issues remain or (b) the fix needs user input — in which case surface the question and stop. Do not report a task complete with known issues outstanding.
4. Save the final clean-pass screenshots to stardust/validation/<artifact>/<viewport>.png so reviewers can compare without re-running.

Per-sub-skill validation specifics live in each skill's reference docs — notably extract/reference/playwright-recipe.md (the canonical recipe), prototype/reference/motion-validation.md (motion-specific gates), and prototype/SKILL.md Phases 2.5–2.8 (the critique / audit / adapt / motion gate cascade).

What stardust never does

• Invent design opinions that contradict impeccable's hard rules. Defer to impeccable.
• Execute a redesign plan without showing it first (hands-off mode records the plan in stardust/direction.md instead of waiting — § Hands-off mode).
• Force a re-run on stale pages without explicit user opt-in.
• Crawl an existing site beyond the user's confirmed page cap (an explicit --pages list is itself the confirmed scope — listed pages are never dropped; the crawler warns rather than truncates when the list exceeds --max).
• Emit platform-specific output from migrate. migrate emits platform-agnostic static HTML; the EDS conversion and delivery are owned by the stardust deploy (one page) and rollout (whole site) skills sub-skills, routed above.

References

• reference/intent-dimensions.md — the axes redesigns move along.
• reference/intent-reasoning.md — the procedure for handling a freeform phrase.
• reference/intent-examples.md — worked examples (8-12) of the reasoning style.
• reference/impeccable-command-map.md — when to reach for each of the 24 impeccable commands.
• reference/state-machine.md — page lifecycle, stale rules, state report format.
• reference/artifact-map.md — every file stardust reads or writes, with ownership, provenance shape and (§ Versioning) what is tracked.
• reference/stardust.gitignore — installed as stardust/.gitignore by Setup step 6.
• reference/divergence-toolkit.md — anti-mediocrity device. Default-moves list, deterministic seed, font decks, role-naming rule. Consumed by direct (when authoring target tokens) and prototype (when generating variants).
• reference/token-contract.md — :root CSS custom-property contract every prototype and migrated page must expose. The token interface between stardust and any downstream consumer.
• reference/data-attributes.md — structural data-* vocabulary applied to sections in every prototype and migrated page. The structural lingua franca between stardust sub-commands and downstream tools.
• reference/journal-format.md — stardust/journal.md entry format. Append-only chronological log; the shared narrative layer over the state machine.
• reference/run-status.md — the stardust/status.jsonl phase-transition contract every skill appends to. The deterministic progress surface for any harness.
• reference/learnings.md — the per-run learnings ledger contract (stardust/learnings.md). rollout's report phase writes it; plugin maintainers harvest pending entries into skill diffs.

Cinematic-feature references (cross-cutting)

Owned by prototype/ because the cinematic feature is scoped to prototype rendering, but cited by direct (when selecting a register), uplift (when picking C's register), and migrate (when copying motion assets through):

• ../prototype/reference/motion-registers.md — five brand-faithful motion personalities (arrival, kinetic-display, live-systems, editorial, kinetic-grid) and the selection heuristic that maps PRODUCT.md Brand Personality traits to a register.
• ../prototype/reference/motion-stack.md — technology choice: Lenis + CSS keyframes + rAF + IntersectionObserver. Why not GSAP. Bundle policy.
• ../prototype/reference/motion-attributes.md — data-* vocabulary the runtime consumes ([data-anim], [data-tile-anim], [data-countup], [data-flip], [data-fill], [data-split], [data-parallax]).
• ../prototype/reference/motion-runtime.md — the canonical inline runtime script that powers every cinematic prototype.
• ../prototype/reference/motion-validation.md § Pass 6 — cinematic-mode validation gates (Lenis boot, reduced-motion fallback, scroll-jack, three-position screenshots, register-match, motion C-cliff detector).

Uplift-feature references

Owned by uplift/. Cited by master routing when delegating $stardust uplift <URL>:

• ../uplift/SKILL.md — one-shot presales orchestrator: extract → tension/trait identification → 3-variant direction → prototype × 3 → open + summarize.
• ../uplift/reference/what-if-candidates.md — catalog of 8 worked captured-trait amplification candidates that B and C select from in Phase 2b — plus its § Extension rule admitting evidence-shaped derived candidates.