UI Governance Gate

UI Governance Gate (Compliance + Drift Control)

Purpose

Provide a hard enforcement layer for UI/UX consistency in LLM-led development.

The ui-governance-gate skill runs deterministic checks (and records evidence) to prevent:

• Tailwind style drift beyond B1 (layout-only)
• local hard-coded colors/shadows/radius/typography in feature code
• contract misuse (data-ui roles/enums)
• feature CSS leaking visual styling

Locked policies

• Tailwind: B1-layout-only
• Theme: token-only
• Evidence directory: .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/ (quick mode)

See:

• ./references/locked-system-parameters.md

When to use

Use when the user asks to:

• verify UI compliance
• reduce drift across LLM generations
• troubleshoot a style inconsistency
• validate a PR before merge
• introduce or review an exception

Avoid when:

• initializing UI spec structure (use ui-system-bootstrap)

Inputs

• Target code roots (default from ui/config/governance.json)
• Optional: explicit run-id

Outputs (evidence)

Writes an audit report to:

• .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/

Minimum artifacts:

• 00-intake.md
• 03-execution-log.md
• 04-post-verify.md
• ui-gate-report.json
• ui-gate-report.md

Steps

Phase 0 — Confirm prerequisites

1. Confirm the repo uses the data-ui contract system:
   • ui/tokens/base.json
   • ui/contract/contract.json
   • docs/context/ui/ui-spec.json

If missing, STOP and route to ui-system-bootstrap.

Phase A — Run the gate

2. Run (full mode; orchestrates configured external tools if available):

python3 .ai/skills/features/ui/ui-governance-gate/scripts/ui_gate.py run --mode full

The gate will:

• generate a run-id
• write evidence under .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/
• exit non-zero if errors are found

Phase B — Remediation loop

3. If the gate fails, fix by priority:

1. Feature code: remove inline styles and hard-coded values
2. Replace Tailwind style utilities with data-ui roles/attrs
3. If contract is missing a reusable semantic capability:
   • draft a contract expansion RFC (approval required)

Real-time approval checkpoint (mandatory)

4. The gate enforces approvals in real time (local workflow; not tied to PR):

• Spec changes (tokens/contract/patterns) require a spec_change approval.
• Policy relaxations (Tailwind boundary, feature CSS relaxations, scan exclusions, etc.) require an exception approval.

If the gate detects an unapproved change, it writes .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/approval.request.json and fails.

Approve locally with:

python3 .ai/skills/features/ui/ui-governance-gate/scripts/ui_gate.py approval-approve --request .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/approval.request.json --approved-by "<name>" --expires-at-utc "<iso>"

Verification

• Gate report created in .ai/.tmp/ui/<run-id>/
• No errors remain (warnings acceptable but should be tracked)
• If exceptions exist, they are documented and time-bounded
• Public central test suite passes: node .ai/tests/run.mjs --suite ui

Boundaries

• MUST NOT silently change tokens/contract.
• MUST NOT weaken the Tailwind boundary.
• Under Tailwind B1, className MUST be static or composed from explicit string literals; avoid opaque dynamic className construction.
• data-ui and contract data-* attributes MUST be static string literals or conditional expressions of string literals.

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