craftsmanship-polish

craftsmanship-polish is a skill for Claude Code from oborchers/fractional-cto. It costs 89 tokens per session (1,879 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A guide to polishing interface details such as alignment, images, shadows, corner shapes, transitions, loading states, empty states, error states, and layout movement during loading.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it when finishing a user interface, checking alignment and image handling, defining visual details, or improving loading, empty, and error states.
Why use it?
It helps catch small visual and interaction defects that make an interface feel unfinished or inconsistent. It also addresses image quality and layout shifts that can move content unexpectedly.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin.

Part of the visual-design-principles plugin — 12 skills, 1 command, 1 agent shipped together

Good fit Use it when finishing a user interface, checking alignment and image handling, defining visual details, or improving loading, empty, and error states.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add oborchers/fractional-cto --skill craftsmanship-polish
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/oborchers/fractional-cto

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install visual-design-principles, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 12 skills, 1 command, 1 agent.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for craftsmanship-polish

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for craftsmanship-polish

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/oborchers/fractional-cto/craftsmanship-polish.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 89 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 1,879 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00089 $0.01879
Opus 5.5 $0.00036 $0.00752
Sonnet 5.5 $0.00018 $0.00376
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00188

Measured 5d ago against content hash 04308226541b, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

craftsmanship-polish scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 5d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

visual-design-principles/skills/craftsmanship-polish/SKILL.md · 129 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 129 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Craftsmanship Is the Multiplier — A Simple Design Flawlessly Executed Beats a Brilliant Design Sloppily Built

Craftsmanship is the strongest single correlate with perceived visual quality in the VisAWI model (Moshagen & Thielsch, 2010). Users cannot articulate why a polished interface feels trustworthy, but they punish sloppiness instantly. Every blurry image, inconsistent radius, and missing hover state erodes credibility.

Pixel-Perfect Alignment

Enforce the >90% grid alignment rule from the layout-spatial-structure skill. Misalignment of even 1px between adjacent elements is visible at retina resolution.

Debug technique: Add outline: 1px solid rgba(255,0,0,0.3) to all elements temporarily. Misaligned edges become obvious.

Image Quality

Rule Requirement
Resolution All images must be >=2x rendered resolution (e.g., 800px image for a 400px container)
Format priority AVIF > WebP > JPEG (use <picture> with fallbacks)
Hero image budget <=300KB after compression
Lazy loading All images below the fold use loading="lazy"
Aspect ratio Always specify width and height attributes to prevent CLS

Shadow Elevation System

Use layered box-shadows for realistic depth. Single-layer shadows look flat and artificial. Define exactly 5 levels and use them consistently.

Level Name Use Case Box-Shadow
0 Flat Inline elements, flush cards none
1 Card Cards, tiles, raised surfaces 0 1px 2px rgba(0,0,0,0.06), 0 1px 3px rgba(0,0,0,0.1)
2 Dropdown Dropdowns, popovers, tooltips 0 4px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.07), 0 2px 4px rgba(0,0,0,0.06)
3 Modal Modals, dialogs, drawers 0 10px 15px rgba(0,0,0,0.1), 0 4px 6px rgba(0,0,0,0.05)
4 Popover Floating toolbars, command palettes 0 20px 25px rgba(0,0,0,0.1), 0 8px 10px rgba(0,0,0,0.04)

Rule: Higher elevation = larger offset + larger blur + lower opacity. Never use a single heavy shadow.

Read the full file on GitHub · 129 lines

Files

What ships with it

1 file beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 5d ago First seen · 129 lines · 89 tokens per session scan A 04308226541b

Subscribe to this mod's changes

craftsmanship-polish is a skill published in the GitHub repository oborchers/fractional-cto (32 stars, last pushed 5d ago), licensed MIT. It adds 89 tokens to every session and 1,879 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-10-13.

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