ai-tells
Spotting Machine-Generated UI
Run one question over the whole surface: could this have been produced in one prompt with nothing specified? If yes, the tells below are why. This is not an anti-AI scan — plenty of generated UI is excellent, because whoever prompted it specified the type, the palette, the elevation ladder, and the curves. The tells appear where nobody decided anything, so every fix is an opinion, not an avoidance. Default posture: fix in place. A tell has exactly one correct replacement and no interesting argument attached to it, so editing the file is cheaper and more honest than writing a report and waiting.
Two siblings share the neighbourhood and the boundary is the shape of the answer. ui-review promises a verdict over every dimension of a diff; this skill answers one question against a fixed, greppable list and returns a patch rather than a judgment. design-critique teaches a looking order that finds things no list contains; this one matches literal tokens. If the user asked "is this well built?" they are not asking this skill.
Before replacing anything, find the project's own answer. The replacement values here are house defaults for a codebase with no system. Grep the token file, the Tailwind theme, the CSS custom properties, and package.json first: if the project already defines an accent, a shadow ladder, a radius scale, or an easing set, the replacement is the project's token and the raw value in the catalog is wrong for this repo. Never resolve a tell by introducing a second styling system alongside the one already there.
Quick reference
| Topic | File | Open it when |
|---|---|---|
| The full catalog — grep pattern, why it reads as generated, replacement value | references/tells.md |
Open it at the start of every scan; it is the list the scan runs against, and the replacement column is the only place the exact values live. |
The scan, in four passes
Run them in order. Each pass is cheaper than the next and catches things the next one would let through.