Not marketing: below is how each version came to be, followed by the rules of the working instruction file, version 2. When you react to a site, this document is what your words end up changing.
What you’re reading is the real file made readable, not a summary — and you can also read the raw file exactly as the engine sees it. Beneath it sits a general craft layer (typography, code quality) that every build also reads; this page shows the AURO layer on top — the part that is learning to be yours.
Version stories
How it was made: Claude read your interview — all 9,834 words of the transcript — and mined it into the taste ledger: every conviction you voiced became a rule candidate with your sentence attached and a line number, so nothing rests on a paraphrase. Then the skill was recompiled from that ledger. What it heard, in your own words:
“The common denominator with me seems to be that whatever the intent of the site, visuals should live in visual harmony, even if the theme is loud and messy.”you · interview, line 340 — now hard rule 4
“When I saw it on a mobile device, I was a bit disappointed of how basic and almost amateuristic it all of a sudden looked.”you, about a site you loved on desktop · line 375 — now hard rule 13
‘Eenvoud siert’, ‘contrast balances’you · line 1399 — now the register of the whole Direction section
Five things your interview changed in the rules:
Also folded in — from round 1’s test results, not from you: a hard prohibition list (the engine may never invent opening hours, prices, quotes, service areas, certifications or review counts — visible placeholder instead), and a ban on the stock small-business page skeleton all four round-1 sites had quietly converged on.
How it was made: compiled from what existed until then — the two calls, your July documents, our own reference notes — deliberately before anyone read your interview answers. That way your interview would show up as a measurable difference between versions instead of vanishing into a rewrite. Every rule carried an honesty tag — you said it, you implied it, our guess, or Max’s own rule — and the guesses were the exact list of things the interview was expected to settle. Your answers changed five of them; that’s the list above.
No skill at all — the tracer site you called “very, very boring.” It stays on the wall as the zero point.
Compiles from your reactions to round 2 — which garage you’d ship and why, your correction lists, your calls on the two open policies. The build backlog is already staged; your words are the missing input.
See the skill at work — one build opened up: brief, instruction, conditions, paper trail →
The rulebook
Each rule carries its provenance: your words means it traces to a sentence of yours from the calls or the interview; our call — not yet asked means the engine needed a rule before you’d been asked, and your signal can overturn it.
At any scroll position the visitor knows where they are and can jump anywhere: persistent compact navigation with a visible active state, a distinct identity per page, footer wayfinding. And at every moment the visitor’s attention has one obvious place to go — beauty that makes people wonder where to look first has failed, no matter how striking. (The principle and the attention line are yours; the specific navigation mechanics are our operationalization.)
Works for the 80-year-old who struggles with phones and the 17-year-old who lives on them. Body text at least 16px, generous tap targets, no hover-only or gesture-only interactions, strong contrast, visible keyboard focus. If the 80-year-old can’t use it, it fails regardless of beauty. (The principle is yours; the exact pixel thresholds are our proxies.)
No filler, but never thin: a visitor should leave knowing what the business does, why to trust it, and how to act. Boring or empty copy fails as hard as clutter. When in doubt, add substance — a real page, a richer gallery — not ornament.
Name one intention for the design and make every visual choice belong to it. Quiet or loud, static or dynamic — all legitimate if the client’s identity calls for them; what is never legitimate is a choice that feels random or out of tune with the rest. Harmony is the invariant; everything else is a variable.
If the client’s identity calls for stillness, still is right — motion is a lever, not a law. When used: a new section announces itself, motion guides the eye in a deliberate sequence and then settles, leaving calm to read in — integrated with the typography and colour, never effects bolted on top. Animation is the smallest lever; imagery and a coherent through-line come first. No autoplay carousels; reduced-motion settings respected. (Those last two floor details are ours.)
Every choice must be derivable from this brief’s business, place and character; no signature element reused across clients. That includes the skeleton: no defaulting to the stock small-business page anatomy or a stock reveal spec. If a site’s structure could be pasted onto another client unchanged, restructure. “Totally different, yet fits the conditions” — surprise bounded by harmony, clarity and the client’s identity. (The mandate is yours; extending it to page skeletons was our call, after round 1 kept converging on one anatomy.)
The generic looks AI design keeps landing on — purple gradients, near-black with one acid accent, cream with terracotta — are forbidden as defaults. If a brief genuinely calls one in, the choice must be justified in writing.
If the client has no photos: no stock imagery, ever — the visual richness is built from typography, colour, spacing, texture and drawn graphics instead. If photos exist but weren’t delivered, the design gets art-directed photo slots plus a shot list the client can follow with a phone. (Your intake form offers clients a stock option, so this line is genuinely waiting on you — queued for a future conversation about photos and imagery.)
Hard prohibition list: opening hours, prices, quotes attributed to real people, service areas, certifications, review counts. Not stated in the brief → visible placeholder, never a plausible guess. And the ethic underneath is yours verbatim: “not seeing them is unintentional, seeing and not fixing is deliberate” — the knowingly shipped defect is the one unforgivable kind. The engine’s self-checks are built on that line. (The ethic is yours; the specific list is ours.)
All copy in the client’s market language — and for Belgian clients, Belgian Dutch: Netherlands-Dutch vocabulary reads foreign there. Register matched to the business, never to marketing-speak. A native-speaker proofread is always recommended in the handover notes.
Semantic structure, unique titles and descriptions, structured data for search and AI engines, and a real FAQ with questions customers actually ask — your conviction that a good FAQ “already goes a long way” is baked in. Structured data may never claim anything the visible page doesn’t say. Invisible to the client, part of the product. (The FAQ conviction is yours; the technical floor list is ours.)
The single contact behaviour the brief names — call, WhatsApp, quote request — is reachable from every screenful without hunting, and nothing competes with it. No contact form on a static site: a form that silently discards messages is worse than none.
The designed feel must survive on a phone — same intention, same quality of composition. A site that turns basic or amateurish on mobile fails entirely, regardless of how beautiful the desktop version is.
Direction
Judgment lines rather than checkable rules — each one names the failure it exists to prevent.
The floor
After building, the engine grades itself against these twelve checks (twelve for thirteen rules: distinctiveness and the no-AI-defaults rule share one check) and must report honestly — a flagged failure is acceptable, a false pass is not. Independent checkers then re-grade everything — in round 2 they caught three of the four self-checks over-claiming, which is exactly why they exist.
Seen enough? The four questions on the showroom page are what version 3 is waiting for — or just say anything on WhatsApp; it all lands in the ledger.