Critique-driven
Critique and refine.
Functional issues you can solve. Direction issues are harder — the work runs, the layout is reasonable, but something's not right. The problems may be directional rather than technical. /critique surfaces them; the corrective tier addresses them.
Run /critique on what's bothering you.
Pass the surface or area as scope: /critique pricing page, /critique onboarding flow, /critique for a full-project read. Spruce reads your context file and produces a narrative critique in five sections: overall take, character and point of view, coherence, specific moments, direction forward.
Unlike /survey, /critique is opinionated. It will name when a design is hedging and recommend specific shifts in direction.
If your project has Discovery artifacts in place (.personas.md, .jtbd.md), you can run /audit alongside — it’s the HCD-grounded counterpart that frames findings against named personas and the jobs they’re hiring the product to do, rather than against general principles. /critique tells you whether the work has a point of view; /audit tells you whether the work serves the people it’s for.
This reads as a capable but undercommitted design. The craft is mostly there — components are clean, spacing is systematic, copy is serviceable — but the product isn’t declaring what it is. The question I’d bring to this is whether “nothing wrong” is the bar, or whether this product deserves to be recognizable.
Read for direction, not punch list.
/critique outputs read like an essay, not like a list of issues to tick through. The Direction Forward section at the end names two or three specific moves that would meaningfully shift the work.
Treat that section as the brief. It tells you which correctives to run and in what order — usually a typography shift, a palette move, or a voice change comes before fine-grained polish.
Apply the recommended correctives.
Run each command Direction Forward named, in order. The corrective tier:
/typeface— Typography discipline — typeface, scale, hierarchy, craft./colorgrade— Color discipline — palette, contrast, accent strategy./voice— Copy discipline — labels, errors, empty states, terminology./refine— Component-level work — state coverage, anatomy, interactions.
Re-critique. Converge.
After applying correctives, run /critique again on the same scope. The output should shift — character concerns from the first pass should now register as addressed; new observations may surface at finer levels of detail.
Repeat until the critique has nothing significant to say. At that point, the work has the point of view it needed.