# Design Tournament > Produce a design reference where none exists, by interrogating the problem then running a blind round-robin between candidates. Use when starting a new page or surface with no prototype, when the existing prototype has been outgrown, or when the user asks to "explore designs", "compare approaches", "run a design tournament", or "which layout is better". - Skill: `marcusgoll/design-tournament` (Agent Skill) - Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add marcusgoll/design-tournament` - Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/marcusgoll/design-tournament/raw - Safety review: pending - Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex - Category: Coding & Dev Tools - Author: marcusgoll (https://skillmd.com/u/marcusgoll) - Updated: 2026-09-17 - Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/marcusgoll/design-tournament --- # Design Tournament `blind-critic` answers **"did we hit the intent?"** It needs a reference. This skill produces one when none exists, using the same comparison mechanism for a different job: **"which intent is best?"** Both sides of every comparison are generated here, which makes this *more* blindable than conformance — there is no authentic-versus-imitation signal for the critic to detect and defer to. ## Phase 0 — Interrogate **You do this with the human. Do not automate it.** Automating the interrogation of someone's requirements defeats its entire purpose: every question extracts information that exists nowhere in the codebase. One question at a time. Recommend an answer to each. Look up anything discoverable from the filesystem rather than asking. Terminate in a written split, not prose: ```json { "surface": "checkride-readiness", "constraints": [ "must show eligibility status without interaction", "instructors manage 20+ students; per-student drill-down is secondary" ], "axes": [ { "name": "disclosure", "options": ["everything visible", "summary then drill-in"] }, { "name": "grouping", "options": ["by student", "by deadline"] } ] } ``` **Constraints** are branches the human decided — every candidate must honour them. **Axes** are branches they could not decide — the tournament resolves them. If phase 0 yields more than four axes it has not converged. Push for more decisions rather than generating a larger field; an unresolved question is cheaper to answer in conversation than in ten screenshot comparisons. ## Phase 1 — Diverge **N = axes + 2.** One candidate per axis, plus a baseline, plus a real-world seed. | Candidate | Varies | Purpose | |---|---|---| | `baseline` | nothing | the control every axis is measured against | | `axis-` | **only** that axis, all else at baseline | isolates one decision | | `seed-` | modelled on a real shipped product | anchors the field outside the model's own distribution | Each candidate is a standalone HTML file under `design/prototype//candidates/`, rendered by the same pipeline as every other reference. Invoke `frontend-design` to generate them. **Vary one axis per candidate.** Candidates that differ on several axes at once make the tournament merely selective — you learn "v3 won" and cannot say which decision earned it, so the result transfers to nothing. One axis per candidate makes it *attributive*: a win is an answer to a specific open question. The seed candidate matters more than it looks. Every other entrant comes from one model and inherits its blind spots; a tournament can only find the best of what it generated. Seeding from something a human shipped is the only entrant that can reveal the whole field is mediocre. ## Phase 2 — Round-robin ```bash cd apps/web && TOURNAMENT_MANIFEST=design/prototype//tournament.json \ pnpm critic:tournament ``` Emits one directory per pair under `.rounds/tournament-/`, plus `key.json`. A planted loser — the first candidate with its vertical rhythm degraded — is added automatically and plays everyone. Dispatch one blind subagent per pair, concurrently, using the prompt and dimension table from `blind-critic/SKILL.md` and `lenses/visual.md`. Each agent gets two image paths and nothing else. **Never read `key.json` before dispatching.** Collect verdicts as `[{ "dir": "...", "winner": "A"|"B"|"tie" }]`, then: ```bash node e2e/critic/tournament-tally.mjs \ e2e/critic/.rounds/tournament- verdicts.json ``` The tally gates in order: 1. **Planted-loser check.** A degraded entrant must lose every pairing. One win and the run is not measuring quality — discard the standings, do not promote. 2. **Transitivity.** ≥2 three-cycles means the candidates are not separable on these dimensions. Return to phase 0 and sharpen the axes; do not crown whoever topped the table. A bracket would have hidden this by never running most pairings. 3. **Standings by win count** — never by score. Across fifteen calibration runs the undegraded side scored 6 nearly every time; score has no usable dynamic range. ## Phase 3 — Synthesize Read the per-dimension findings, not just the winner. When `axis-density` won on `density` while `baseline` won on `hierarchy`, graft them and run the graft against the champion as one final pair. This step also covers the known weakness of varying one axis at a time: interaction effects are invisible to a fractional design, and the graft is where a combination that beats both parents shows up. ## Phase 4 — Promote Winner moves to `design/prototype/.html` and gains an entry in `critic-map.json`. From here the ordinary conformance loop applies and this skill is done. Record the axis decisions the tournament settled. That record is the durable output — more valuable than the HTML, because it transfers to every future surface. ## Applying this to non-visual work The mechanism is medium-agnostic; only the rendering changes. For API design, generate N designs, render each as a normalised HTTP request/response transcript, and compare on `error-shape`, `naming coherence`, `pagination & idempotency`, `discoverability` — never on status codes or schema validity, which OpenAPI tooling already decides. The blinding objection that rules out API *conformance* — that generated and shipped code carry different fingerprints, so the critic infers which is real and defers to it — does not apply here, because in a tournament both sides are generated from the same brief. Do not build a second lens until the first has cleared its gates.