ux-dark-patterns-audit

ux-dark-patterns-audit is a skill for Claude Code from Uxcel-Lab/product-skills. It costs 77 tokens per session (2,367 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review of a user interface, user journey, or wording that looks for deceptive design choices—ways of pushing people into actions they did not mean to take.

In plain words
What is it for?
Use it to review conversion flows, checkouts, paywalls, sign-ups, onboarding, or cancellation journeys. It returns prioritized problems with their likely intent, seriousness, and a more honest fix.
Why use it?
It helps separate deliberate manipulation from ordinary usability mistakes and makes the ethical risks in sign-ups, payments, subscriptions, and cancellations explicit.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: positional $N argument.

Part of the uxcel plugin — 58 skills shipped together

Good fit Use it to review conversion flows, checkouts, paywalls, sign-ups, onboarding, or cancellation journeys. It returns prioritized problems with their likely intent, seriousness, and a more honest fix.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/uxcel-lab/product-skills/dark-patterns
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 Uxcel-Lab/product-skills --skill dark-patterns
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/Uxcel-Lab/product-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install uxcel, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 58 skills.

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 ux-dark-patterns-audit

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uxcel-lab/product-skills/dark-patterns.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/uxcel-lab/product-skills/dark-patterns)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/uxcel-lab/product-skills/dark-patterns"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/uxcel-lab/product-skills/dark-patterns.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>
Per session 77 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,367 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 $0.00077 $0.02367
Opus 5 $0.00039 $0.01184
Sonnet 5 $0.00015 $0.00473
Haiku 4.5 $0.00008 $0.00237

Measured 8d ago against content hash d4b191b5e069, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-08, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

ux-dark-patterns-audit 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 8d 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.

ux/audits/dark-patterns/SKILL.md · 172 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 172 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

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.


What this skill changes vs. default behavior

By default, manipulation only gets flagged when it's blatant, with no framework, no severity, and a tendency to either miss subtle patterns (preselection, forced continuity, manufactured FOMO, bad defaults) or over-accuse honest mistakes. This skill forces:

  1. A systematic sweep of the named pattern catalog — not just the obvious offenders.
  2. Intent classification — Dark vs. Grey vs. honest Mistake — so findings are fair, not alarmist.
  3. A concrete, honest-design fix for each.
  4. Decision tests (the Newspaper Test, the intent-gap question) that surface the subtle cases.

The core lens: intent and the dark / grey / mistake spectrum

Read the full file on GitHub · 172 lines

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. 8d ago First seen · 172 lines · 77 tokens per session scan A d4b191b5e069

Subscribe to this mod's changes

ux-dark-patterns-audit is a skill published in the GitHub repository Uxcel-Lab/product-skills (10 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 77 tokens to every session and 2,367 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 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 2026-08-31.

Related

Other skills, from other repositories

pm-brand-motion

A guided process for defining a brand's motion style and making a logo animation demonstration.

konglong87/superPM · 77 tokens

pm-proto

A product-prototyping workflow for planning how an application should work and what its screens should contain. It connects product requirements to interface layouts and interactions.

konglong87/superPM · 55 tokens

design-mobile-apps

Use when the user wants to design a mobile app or UI screens, when they mention their Sleek (sleek.design) projects, or when implementing Sleek designs in code (HTML, React Native, SwiftUI).

aiskillstore/marketplace · 49 tokens

dengguang-zhaoming-bikeng-zhinan

A Chinese-language knowledge guide about home lighting, including ceiling lights, light strips, color temperature, color rendering, and room zoning.

aiskillstore/marketplace · 99 tokens

archify

Create polished, validated architecture, workflow, sequence, data-flow, and lifecycle/state diagrams as explorable standalone HTML with inline SVG, dark/light themes, optional trace motion, and PNG/JPEG/WebP/SVG/WebM export. Accept plain-language requirements or pasted Mermaid flowchart, sequenceDiagram, and…

aiskillstore/marketplace · 130 tokens

landing-page-design

Landing page conversion optimization with layout rules, hero section design, and CTA psychology. Covers above-the-fold formula, social proof placement, mobile design, and F-pattern reading. Use for: startup landing pages, product pages, SaaS marketing, conversion optimization. Triggers: landing page, hero section…

aiskillstore/marketplace · 102 tokens