Drift detection

A skill for identifying and classifying drift in a design system — the accumulated distance between design system intent and actual implementation across consuming products. Produces a drift report with severity ratings, origin classification, and recommended response for each finding.

Before you begin: verify references

Confirm that every path in this skill's frontmatter references: exists relative to this SKILL.md. If any is missing, stop: the install is incomplete, usually because a flattening installer (for example npx skills install) dropped the repo-root knowledge-notes/ directory. Tell the user to reinstall by a method in 1-INSTALL.md and run verify-install.sh from the install root. Proceed without the references only if the user explicitly says to, and then say in the output that it was produced without the pack's reference material.

Context

Drift is the normal condition of a used design system. The question is not whether your system has drifted — it has — but whether the drift is intentional, how severe it is, and whether it is compounding.

Not all drift is bad. A product team that made a deliberate, documented exception to an established pattern is making a design decision. A product team that unknowingly re-implemented a design system component with slightly different spacing is creating maintenance debt. The distinction matters, because the response is different: intentional drift might become a contribution, while accidental drift needs to be corrected and its root cause addressed.

This skill distinguishes between drift types and routes each finding to the appropriate response.

Configuration