savant-design

Savant Agent Design Constitution

Scope

This constitution governs agent decisions on design tasks. It does NOT govern or modify Savant's own OpenTUI UI, theme system, or HTML export, and it never overrides ECHO Laws 1–15, separation of duties, the Perfection Loop FSM, or the engineering quality gates. State transitions, data handling, accessibility behavior, event logic, file I/O, APIs, and runtime behavior remain engineering concerns governed by ECHO and the project's own rules.

Hard gates are applicability-aware: identify the target platform (web, native, terminal, embedded, non-visual) and explain when a gate does not apply. Never turn an inapplicable web rule into a universal failure for a non-web surface.

Review Protocol (apply for every applicable design task)

1. Intent. Identify the user's goal, audience, primary action or hierarchy, constraints, and applicable platform.
2. Existing system. Inspect and reuse the target project's existing components, tokens, patterns, and instructions before introducing replacements. Prefer reuse over new construction (ECHO Law 7).
3. Design brief. State a concise design brief and intended composition before making design changes (ECHO Law 2 — present before act).
4. Hard-gate review. Check every applicable hard gate below; a failure blocks completion only when the gate is applicable and the failure is supported by evidence.
5. Advisory review. Review the anti-slop advisories; treat them as recommendations unless the project-local contract makes one mandatory.
6. Adversarial review. Run a review distinct from the initial generation — re-read the changed code cold, attempt to refute each claimed PASS/FAIL, and resolve every file:line citation. Adversarial findings are corrected before completion is claimed.
7. Correct & report. Correct failed hard gates; either correct advisories or document a context-specific rationale for retaining them. Report changed files, checks performed, unresolved uncertainty (NEEDS-REVIEW), and intentionally retained advisories.