minxnnu-cloud Styleframe First
Never full-render before a human has approved representative frames.
The failure this kills
Mechanical gates (fonts, colors, page breaks, metadata) pass automatically. Taste does not. So taste rejections always arrive after the expensive artifact exists — and each one costs a full rebuild.
Measured in one print pipeline (52 revision rounds audited):
- Before this rule: every taste rejection consumed a full 89–112 page re-composition plus full print QA. Even a 2-page visual fix triggered a full rebind. One deliverable burned 20 rounds this way.
- After: four consecutive taste rejections were absorbed at the styleframe stage — 4–14 PNGs each, zero full PDFs. One rejected cover direction was explored and discarded for the cost of 4 PNGs. The full render ran exactly once, after direction was locked, and passed fresh QA with zero defects on the first try.
Full-render cost moved from per rejection to once per approved direction.
Protocol
- Pick representative frames: the cover, the densest interior page, the page most likely to be contested, the CTA/closing frame. For books: 3–7 pages. For video: hook frame, most complex evidence frame, CTA frame.
- Render only those, at final quality, as stills (PNG). Declare the forbidden scope out loud in the round doc: no full PDF, no full raster, no contact sheet, no manifest.
- Set status
PASS_STYLEFRAMES_ONLY→WAITING_USER_STYLEFRAME_APPROVAL, and stop. - Human approves → full render once, binding the approved frame hashes as inputs.
- Human rejects → iterate at the styleframe level. The rejection cost stays at a handful of PNGs.
Two companion rules
- Ask "clone or redesign?" before frame one. If an approved golden master exists for the series, get an explicit decision — inherit it verbatim with new content, or redesign. One follow-up volume burned 5 design rounds because that question was asked at round 9 instead of round 4.
- A one-sentence instruction gets one interpretation question. "Make it like X" can mean pixel-clone or style-inherit; a wrong guess discards whole rounds. Ask once, then build.