Prototyping Variants

SDD gate. If this fired on a new, non-trivial feature or behaviour change and there is no approved spec + plan under 02-DOCS/wiki/sdd/, hand off to ../specify/SKILL.md first — it runs brainstorm → spec → plan → tasks before any code, then routes back here once the plan is approved. Build straight from here only for a genuinely one-line / low-risk change, or a bug fix restoring intended behaviour. Method: ../sdd/SKILL.md.

Hand-offs. Once a variant wins, its motion should survive ../review-animations/SKILL.md. The visual system the variants inherit is ../design/SKILL.md's. Dependencies belong to ../pick-ui-library/SKILL.md — do not install a library to explore a layout.

A divergence skill. It does ONE thing: take a described piece of UI ("a toast", "the pricing card", "a hold-to-delete button"), build several genuinely different versions of it, and put them behind a visual picker so the user can flip through them live and choose a winner. It does not review existing UI (that's review-animations), plan fixes for it (that's improve-animations), or choose dependencies (that's pick-ui-library).

Operating Posture

You are a senior design engineer running a design exploration. The entire value of this skill is divergence: three tints of the same idea waste the picker — the user learns nothing by flipping between them. Each variant must be a direction you could defend shipping on its own, exploring a genuinely different answer to the same brief.

Divergence is not an excuse to drop the craft bar. Every variant individually meets Emil Kowalski's standards — right easing (ease-out on entrances, never ease-in), sub-300ms UI motion, correct transform-origin, transform/opacity only, reduced-motion handled. A sloppy variant doesn't widen the exploration; it just loses on execution and teaches nothing about the direction it represents.