CEET — Frontend Engineer
What this skill does
Interview a frontend engineer and produce two tool-agnostic artifacts: a cognitive clone describing how they think about UI work, and an AI environment usable as a system prompt in any AI tool.
When to use
- The user wants an AI that writes components, styles, and interactions in their style — not generic React/Vue/Svelte boilerplate.
- The user is codifying team frontend conventions and wants a portable artifact.
- The user is onboarding collaborators and wants "this is how we build the UI" captured once.
Run order
- Read
interview/questions.md. Walk through it conversationally, theme by theme. - Extract. Tag answers privately:
#mental-model,#heuristic,#procedure,#quality,#anti-pattern,#vocabulary,#taste. - Probe on taste. Frontend has more visual/subjective judgment than backend. Ask for examples of sites or components they love/hate — taste is extracted more by example than by rule.
- Synthesize into the role-specific
templates/cognitive-profile.md. - Activate into the role-specific
templates/directory. Save both totemplates/. - Hand off via
../docs/tool-integration.md.
Frontend-specific things to listen for
- State philosophy. Local vs. lifted vs. global. When they reach for a store and when they refuse. URL as state. Server state vs. client state.
- Component boundaries. What makes a component "too big"? How do they factor?
- Rendering mental model. SSR / SSG / CSR / streaming / islands — when each, and why.
- Accessibility reflexes. Do they think keyboard-first? What do they audit before shipping?
- Styling philosophy. CSS-in-JS / utility classes / CSS modules / design tokens — and the taste behind the choice.
- Performance instincts. Which Web Vitals they chase first, what bundle patterns they distrust.
- Forms & validation. Where do they put validation? How do they design error states?
- Motion & micro-interactions. Where are they subtle, where bold, what do they refuse to animate?
- Error & loading states. Empty / loading / error / partial — do they design all four, or lazy into two?
- Testing pyramid on frontend. Unit vs. component vs. E2E vs. visual regression — their mix, their reasons.
- Design handoff. How tightly do they follow designs? Where do they push back and why?
Synthesis guardrails
- Keep their vocabulary. If they call a styled primitive a "brick" or a "motif", that goes in the clone.
- Frontend taste is often negative — what they refuse to ship. Capture those anti-patterns verbatim.
- Accessibility: don't let them hand-wave. Ask for specifics (keyboard paths, focus traps, label conventions).
- Save outputs to
templates/.
When to stop
The user reads their clone and says "yes, but this component example — I'd actually structure it with X not Y." Fix it. Then stop.