review-rubric — Phase 5 mechanical gate

§A runs BEFORE deploy and is a completion gate, not a suggestion. Most items are verified by grep/code inspection. Item 9f is the hard machine gate for the animated-website default: a website that ships without the scroll-scrub component + scene media (and without an explicit non-animated choice in the brief) FAILS, no matter how polished the rest is — this is the single most common miss, so run 9f every time. For the animated website, item 9e adds its interactive runtime checks in local preview before the final deploy. There is no post-deploy visual/screenshot review — this mechanical gate is the only verification.

§A. Mechanical gate (pre-deploy, code-level)

Check each item; fix every hit before deploying.

Placeholders — zero <...>-style tokens (e.g. <brand name>, <product>), lorem, REMOVE_THIS, blank-app-v1, or empty src="". Grep for the literal markers: grep -rniE 'lorem ipsum|REMOVE_THIS|blank-app-v1' app/src/, and scan for any remaining <...> placeholder tokens in quoted strings.
Em-dash ban — grep -rn "—\|–" app/src/ over user-visible strings returns nothing (code comments exempt).
Banned default palette — none of the banned palette families from design-recipe.md §2 appear in styles.css/tokens: beige/brass/espresso hexes, graphite/near-black + orange/amber/ember accent, near-black + neon cyan/blue/green accent, AI purple/violet glow, or the palette family of your previous build in this chat. Overridable ONLY by the user's explicit brand colors, justified in the design brief.
Eyebrow ration — count eyebrow-position section labels only. An eyebrow is a small uppercase/mono kicker sitting DIRECTLY above the section's display headline in the same column; nothing else counts. Must be ≤ ceil(sectionCount / 3). Uppercase mono in non-eyebrow roles (spec strips, table/metric captions, rail labels, footer column heads) is exempt — especially when the reference boards show them. Grep for uppercase tracking to find candidates, then classify by position.
Asset kit complete + referenced — every file downloaded into app/public/ is actually referenced by a route/component; the hero references a real generated asset (no picsum/stock/CSS-gradient-only hero); the icon slots use the generated icon set (or the documented library fallback), and no kit item from asset-system.md's "always" list is silently missing. 5b. Head kit complete — the full favicon/meta set from asset-system.md §7 is present and wired: favicon (ico/svg + png sizes), apple-touch-icon, 192/512 + maskable icons with a site.webmanifest, theme-color, and the full OG + twitter card block with absolute image URLs. An empty <head> or the scaffold's default favicon is a gate failure.
h-screen — zero occurrences; use h-dvh / min-h-dvh.
SSR safety — no window / document / localStorage / navigator at module top level or in render; every [C]/[W] component behind a mounted gate; [W] additionally React.lazy.
Reduced motion — every animation source (motion/react, GSAP, registry components) paired with a prefers-reduced-motion guard or static fallback.
CTA integrity + bespoke chrome — one label per intent page-wide (no "Get in touch" + "Contact us"); no CTA label longer than ~3 words for primaries; AND no shared site-wide button style: grep for a repeated CTA class string / Button utility component reused across sections — every CTA per the brief's inventory has its own component with its own interaction identity. 9b. Screenshot-safe reveals — flag any opacity: 0 / opacity-0 whose removal depends on a viewport/scroll trigger (whileInView, IntersectionObserver entry, ScrollTrigger-gated fade-ins). Hover-state decorations at opacity-0 are fine. Nothing may sit invisible waiting for a viewport trigger; animate from visible states (y-offset/blur) or fire on mount. Video elements need a poster (or a rendered first frame) so headless shots never show a black box. A full-page headless screenshot must show every section. 9c. No Higgsfield branding on type: "website" builds — grep -rin "higgsfield\|quanta" app/src/ returns no user-visible strings, no Quanta imports, no q-prefixed tokens, no "Powered by / Built on" badge, no Higgsfield marks in page chrome. fnf/auth strings in server/service code are fine — that's the functional contract, not branding. On type: "app" builds this check inverts for the design system: Quanta imports and q- tokens are REQUIRED there and "Sign in with Higgsfield" is part of the product — only gratuitous "Powered by / Built on Higgsfield" marketing badges remain forbidden. 9d. Anti-convergence ledger honored — the brief lists the previous build's six identity axes (palette family, type pairing, hero architecture, Tier-1 technique, CTA garments, corner language) and this build differs on ≥4; the rationed garments (drawing underline, hover flood-fill, framed block) appear at most once page-wide combined. On the non-animated path the Tier-1 technique carries a wow-catalog.md ID and is interactive (not a passive loop); on the default animated-website path the Tier-1 technique IS the scroll-scrub animated website (enforced by 9f) — a generic wow-catalog ID does NOT satisfy the default path. 9e. Animated website — A4 seam-locked scroll scrub (every website by default; skip only if the user explicitly opted out) — verify every media segment has a first-frame poster extracted from the exact deployed clip; chapter copy is server-rendered in semantic document flow (not hidden until a viewport callback); prefers-reduced-motion performs no video fetch and shows the complete static story; desktop and lighter mobile encodes are wired; connector/leg handoffs use the neighboring rendered clips' ACTUAL boundary frames; camera velocity does not reverse accidentally; initialization runs only in an effect; and teardown aborts fetches, removes listeners/video nodes, cancels RAF, and revokes Blob URLs. Scrub videos directly from seekable MP4/Blob URLs, ensure CSP media-src permits blob:, and ensure no second ScrollTrigger timeline drives the same media. Inspect each seam immediately before/after in both scroll directions and test source swapping, a fast mobile flick, and unmount/remount in local preview before final deploy. 9f. Animation mode gate (machine-verifiable — HARD, every website). This is the completion gate for the animated-website default; a site that passes every other check but this one is NOT done. Steps:
grep -n "^Animation mode:" app/design-brief.md — there MUST be exactly one such line. Zero matches → FAIL (the brief never declared the state).
If the value is animated-website, ALL of these must hold, or FAIL:
- the scroll-scrub component exists — ls app/src/components/scroll-scrub/scroll-scrub.tsx succeeds — and is actually imported/rendered by a route (grep for its import);
- real film shipped — at least ONE clip (single-shot ships exactly one; a multi-leg journey ships one per leg) under app/public/assets/**/*.mp4 (the seam-locked chain), each with a first-frame poster (item 9e);
- the brief carries the journey block (Journey scenes + Camera architecture A/B) written in Phase 0. A website on this path with no scroll-scrub component or no scene MP4s is the failure mode this gate exists to catch — do NOT deploy it; go build the camera journey.
If the value is non-animated, the line MUST record the user's choice (an intake pick or a verbatim request). No scroll-scrub artifacts are required; instead confirm the site clears the wow-maker.md craft floor and any chosen wow-catalog.md technique is actually built (9d). A non-animated with no recorded user choice → FAIL (treat as animated-website and go back to step 2).
Section plan honored — the built page matches app/design-brief.md's section plan (families, order, no consecutive family repeats). If the plan changed during the build, the brief was updated to match.
Copy self-audit — every visible string re-read; nothing grammatically broken, referent-unclear, filler-verb ("Elevate", "Seamless"…), or fake-precise (92%, 4.1× without a source).