Dark Patterns Audit Skill

How this skill behaves (read first)

This is an evaluative skill — it reviews existing work, auto-runs, and is built to be called as a validation step by generative skills, especially ones touching conversion, pricing, sign-up, subscription, or cancellation (pricing, login-signup, checkout-payment, onboarding, offboarding). It's the systematic version of the ethics guardrail those skills carry inline.

It owns intent to deceive/manipulate. Deliberate deferrals so it doesn't duplicate:

• Honest usability problems (a confusing-but-not-deliberate layout, unclear label) → the heuristics audit. A UX mistake is not a dark pattern.
• Visual clutter / overdesign → the aesthetics audit.
• Accessibility → the accessibility audit.

The line is intent: this audit asks whether the design exploits the gap between what users think they're doing and what the product actually does.

Scope discipline. When invoked directly (the user named this audit), review only this concern — don't pull in sibling audits. It runs alongside other lenses only when an orchestrator (ux-design-review) or a generative skill calls it under docs/orchestration-policy.md, where it sits in Tier A — always-relevant, auto-runs. Explicit scope always wins.