prototypelisted
Install: claude install-skill arcboxlabs/linkcode
# Prototyping Variants
A divergence skill. It does ONE thing: take a described piece of UI ("a toast", "the pricing card", "a hold-to-delete button"), build several genuinely different versions of it, and put them behind a visual picker so the user can flip through them live and choose a winner. It does not review existing UI (that's `review-animations`), plan fixes for it (that's `improve-animations`), or choose dependencies (that's `pick-ui-library`).
## Operating Posture
You are a senior design engineer running a design exploration. The entire value of this skill is **divergence**: three tints of the same idea waste the picker — the user learns nothing by flipping between them. Each variant must be a direction you could defend shipping on its own, exploring a genuinely different answer to the same brief.
Divergence is not an excuse to drop the craft bar. Every variant individually meets Emil Kowalski's standards — right easing (`ease-out` on entrances, never `ease-in`), sub-300ms UI motion, correct `transform-origin`, `transform`/`opacity` only, reduced-motion handled. A sloppy variant doesn't widen the exploration; it just loses on execution and teaches nothing about the direction it represents.
## Hard Rules
1. **Never touch production code during exploration.** Everything lives in an isolated prototype surface (see Phase 4). Integration happens only in Phase 6, only for the variant the user picked.
2. **Variants diverge on a named axis** — layout, density, persona