name: reskin
description: Rebuild an existing site's pages with byte-faithful content on a separately-defined donor design system — another live site, or local static HTML prototypes (Figma donors are contract-defined, not yet implemented). Content fidelity is gated byte-level (text, ordered images, SEO metadata); design application is flexible (content re-laid-out onto donor modules). Use when the user says "reskin my site with this design", "apply this design system to my content", "restyle my site to look like ", "new design, same content", "rebrand my site using these prototypes", or names a content site plus a design donor. NOT for redesigning from intent (that's the stardust core extract/direct/prototype chain) and NOT for keeping the current design while migrating (that's the replica flow).
license: Apache-2.0
compatibility: Requires Node 22+, Playwright with Chromium resolvable from the project, playwright-cli on PATH, and the impeccable skill (github.com/pbakaus/impeccable) installed alongside stardust.
stardust:reskin — same content, donor design
The user has a site (the content source) and a design that already
exists somewhere else (the donor: another live site, or a directory
of static HTML prototypes; Figma is future scope). Reskin rebuilds the
content site's pages so that every visible byte of content survives —
text, ordered images, CTAs, SEO metadata — while the surface comes
entirely from the donor's tokens and module vocabulary.
The two halves have different contracts:
- Content is non-negotiable. The gate is byte equality of
whitespace-normalized visible text, the ordered visible-image set,
and full metadata carry-over. Not "close" — equal, after an
explicitly declared, executable normalization ledger.
- Design is flexible. Content is re-laid-out onto donor modules; a
carousel may become a static card grid, a sidebar may become a band.
Structure (element counts, tag sequences) is informational, never
gating — a reskin re-structures markup by design.
The decisive rule, validated in the UC2-E1 experiment (a healthcare site ×
a fintech donor: 2281/2281 text bytes, 7/7 images, 47/47 slots, 13/13 metadata,
17/17 donor-token probe): the page is generated programmatically from
the captured content model — content strings are never retyped. Byte
fidelity then holds by construction and the content gate becomes a
regression check instead of a debugging tool.
Inputs
<content-url> — required. The site whose content is preserved.
- Donor, exactly one of:
--donor <url> — a live site whose design system is adopted.
--donor-dir <path> — a directory of local static HTML
prototypes (claude-design / Mobirise / Relume / Lovable / v0 /
hand-coded). Served on localhost and captured through the same
path — recipe in reference/donor-sources.md § Local prototypes.
--donor-figma <url> — not yet implemented. The contract is
defined (reference/donor-sources.md § Figma) but the adapter is
future scope. Tell the user exactly this: "Figma donors are not
implemented yet. Export the frames as static HTML prototypes (or
point me at a live staging URL of the design) and re-run with
--donor-dir / --donor. The Figma adapter — variables→palette,
text styles→type, frame screenshots→vision references, provenance
class figma-mcp — is specced in
skills/reskin/reference/donor-sources.md and will land in a
later release." Do not improvise a partial Figma capture.
--pages <slug,slug,...> — optional. Restrict the content capture
to specific pages. Default: the archetype set (one page per page
family; a spec's archetypes.json names them; scale to siblings happens in Phase 6 via migrate).
--scope <selectors> — optional. Pre-declare the content-root
scope for a single-page run (comma-separated, ! suffix keeps a
scope whole; see reference/content-model.md § Scope declaration).
Without it, run the scope-discovery procedure per page.
Setup
- Run the master skill's setup (
../stardust/SKILL.md § Setup):
impeccable dep check, context loader, state read. Flow. Stamp
state.json.flow: "reskin" if unset
(../stardust/reference/state-machine.md § Flow keys); if another
flow is set, print it and the switch command
($stardust reskin --switch-flow) instead of running.
- Playwright import-resolvability probe — same contract as
../extract/SKILL.md § Setup:
node -e "import('playwright').then(()=>process.exit(0))" from the
project root; on failure
npm i -D playwright --no-save --legacy-peer-deps. Re-run the
probe at the start of every phase that renders — a --no-save
install is pruned by any later real npm i.
- Copy the scripts into the project. ESM resolves
import('playwright') from the script's directory and the plugin
tree ships no node_modules. Copy skills/reskin/scripts/* (all
five files — capture-content.mjs and dom-equality.mjs import
source-normalize.mjs as a sibling) byte-identical to
stardust/scripts/reskin/, and skills/diff/scripts/ live-session.mjs to stardust/scripts/diff/ — every reskin gate
script (capture-content, dom-equality, donor-probe, and
slot-coverage) imports it unconditionally at startup, regardless
of target type: without the copy each one exits 2 immediately,
even for --help or a local-file --rendered target. It supplies
ALL live-target hardening (real-Chrome UA + standard headers,
challenge detection, headed-stealth escalation), resolved from
../diff/ next to ../reskin/, so keep the two dirs siblings.
Run the copies.
- Origin collision — if
stardust/state.json records a different
site.originUrl, stop and ask before mixing sites, per
../extract/SKILL.md § Setup.
Procedure
Phase 1 — INGEST DONOR
The donor's design system is captured separately from the content
site, into stardust/canon-source/. Full recipes per donor type in
reference/donor-sources.md; summary:
- Live URL (
--donor <url>): invoke
$stardust extract <content-url> --design-source <donor-url> — the
existing skill, unchanged. It lands in stardust/canon-source/: the
donor's pages/, assets/ (screenshots included),
_brand-extraction.json, _crawl-log.json, and a descriptive
DESIGN.md + DESIGN.json, and stamps
state.json.designSource = { url, capturedAt, path } — see
../extract/SKILL.md § Cross-site brand sources.
- Local prototype dir (
--donor-dir <path>): serve the directory
on localhost (python3 -m http.server <port> --directory <path>)
and run the same --design-source capture path against the
localhost origin. Record the real provenance (localhost serve of
<path>) in canon-source/_crawl-log.json. Recipe details —
page listing, index-less directories, port hygiene — in
reference/donor-sources.md § Local prototypes.
- Figma (
--donor-figma): FUTURE. Surface the exact message from
§ Inputs and stop.
Then author two reskin-owned donor artifacts (contracts in
reference/donor-sources.md):
stardust/reskin/donor-tokens.json — the curated, probe-able
token sheet: palette roles, type ramp, layout metrics, button
specs, radii, shadows, motifs — every value a computed-style string
the Phase 5 probe can assert verbatim. Curated from
canon-source/DESIGN.json + _brand-extraction.json + the raw
computed styles; cites the donor page each value came from. On a
bounded donor capture (a single donor page, no full
--design-source run) there is no DESIGN.json,
_brand-extraction.json, or designSource stamp to curate from —
the token sheet is authored entirely from raw computed-style
sampling of the donor page, a first-class parallel path
(reference/donor-sources.md § Two first-class token-sourcing
paths).
stardust/reskin/donor-modules.md — the enumerated module
vocabulary (M1..Mn): one row per donor module with where-seen
screenshot evidence and an anatomy description. This is the closed
set the Phase 3 mapping brief maps onto.
The pin-one-reference-page rule (hard). Real donors run multiple
design systems concurrently — the experiment's donor served radius-4px
/ 1266px on its homepage and pill-radius / 1080px on older product
pages. Consolidating across them produces a chimera no live page ever
shipped, and the token probe then asserts against nothing. When donor
pages disagree on a token, pin ONE donor reference page per module
family, record it in donor-tokens.json (curatedFrom + a note
naming the reference page), and demote the other pages to
corroboration.
Phase 2 — CONTENT-MODEL CAPTURE
The new capability: a byte-oriented capture of each content page —
distinct from extract's design-oriented capture. Run the ported
capture script per page:
node stardust/scripts/reskin/capture-content.mjs \
--url <page-url> \
--scope '<sel1,sel2!,...>' \
--normalize stardust/reskin/normalize/<slug>.mjs \
--out stardust/reskin/content-model/<slug>/
It writes stardust/reskin/content-model/<slug>/content-model.json
(full contract in reference/content-model.md): per section-slot —
headings with levels, eyebrows and other leftovers, body paragraphs,
list items, CTAs with absolute hrefs, ordered visible images
(currentSrc + alt), plus the ordered stream (ordered) — the
same content as kind-tagged nodes in document order with nesting and
separator flags, the render surface Phase 4 consumes; page-level —
full SEO metadata (title,
description, canonical, OG, Twitter, JSON-LD, lang, favicon), the
whitespace-normalized visible text of the scope (the content-gate
reference string), and a full-page screenshot.
Two declarations are mandatory per page, because they are the
experiment's top two failure modes:
- CONTENT-ROOT SCOPE declaration. Naive scoping silently dropped
30% of the experiment page's content — the hero and a banner
carousel lived inside
<header>, outside the obvious #content
root, and byte equality would have "passed" against the incomplete
reference. Never trust main or #content blind. Run the
scope-discovery procedure (reference/content-model.md
§ Scope discovery): compare the captured scope text against the
whole-body text and the page screenshot, verify the h1 is inside
the scope, widen with comma-separated multi-scope selectors until
everything visible in the screenshot that isn't declared chrome is
in the model. Chrome exclusions (nav, footer) are declared deltas
(D1-style), not silent omissions. The capture script prints a
coverage line (bodyTextLen / scopeTextLen / h1InScope) to make
the check mechanical.
- EXECUTABLE NORMALIZATION LEDGER. Cookie-consent chrome removal,
carousel de-duplication (hidden slides are absent from
innerText;
clone slides duplicate it — rotating carousels break byte
determinism), and any page-specific cleanup live in a per-page
ledger module stardust/reskin/normalize/<slug>.mjs that extends
the shared default (scripts/source-normalize.mjs). The same
ledger file is passed verbatim to the capture and to every gate
(--normalize), so the gate measures exactly the normalization the
capture declared. The ledger is code, not prose. Format in
reference/content-model.md § Normalization ledger.
Phase 3 — MAPPING BRIEF
Author stardust/reskin/mapping.md — the cross-origin mapping brief.
Full contract and entry schema in reference/mapping-brief.md. Per
every content slot in the content model:
- assigned donor module id (from
donor-modules.md's closed
vocabulary) + a one-line rationale grounded in slot anatomy vs
module anatomy;
- status ∈
{mapped, new-module, chrome, carried-invisible} —
the last for sr-only/visually-hidden content inside the byte scope
(carried verbatim into an equivalent hidden element, no donor
module; reference/mapping-brief.md § Status semantics).
Gates before any rendering:
- ≥ 80% of content slots
mapped onto named donor modules. Below
that, the donor vocabulary doesn't cover this content — stop and
surface (see § Stop conditions).
- Every
new-module entry is explicitly composed from donor
tokens (name the tokens it borrows: input spec + primary button
spec, etc.) and listed in the brief's stats block. New modules are
never silently improvised mid-render.
- Chrome swaps documented — nav/footer replaced by donor chrome
carrying the source's links is a declared delta, excluded from the
content-gate scope.
- Casing / text-transform policy declared. The donor may render
eyebrows uppercase (or the source may — Chrome's
innerText
reflects text-transform, so captured text is rendered-case).
The underlying text stays byte-faithful; casing is applied via CSS
text-transform only, never by editing the string. Policy details
in reference/mapping-brief.md § Casing policy.
Composite source sections (one wrapper div holding two logical
regions) are split into atomic slots in the brief — section ≠ slot.
Phase 4 — PROGRAMMATIC RENDER
The decisive validated rule: the page is GENERATED from
content-model.json — never retyped by hand. Write a renderer
script per archetype (stardust/reskin/renderers/<archetype>.mjs,
modeled on the experiment's render-reskin.mjs) that:
- reads the page's
content-model.json and interpolates every
visible string, href, and image URL from the model (HTML-escaped) —
if a string appears in the output HTML but not in the model, the
renderer is wrong;
- takes each slot's structure from the ordered stream
(
sections[].ordered, reference/content-model.md § The ordered
stream): kind-tagged nodes in document order, nesting preserved
(a CTA wrapping its heading and vice versa), sep flags marking
zero-separator inline joins. The stream is innerText-consistent
by construction (its text nodes are sliced from the parent's
rendered innerText — the byte-gate basis), so emitting it
verbatim is safe. Emit nodes in stream order; emit
sep: "" neighbours with no whitespace between them (inline);
never reorder, and never reconstruct order or separators from
visibleText —
the first field run did exactly that (per-type arrays matched
greedily against visibleText as an oracle) and burned three
debug rounds on duplicate identical strings, both directions of
CTA/container nesting, and zero-separator inline li runs, all
of which the stream now captures structurally;
- renders
formControl nodes as equivalent controls, not text:
a <select> carrying the captured option texts verbatim, in
order; inputs/textareas carrying value/placeholder — restyled
with donor tokens (the new-module composition rules apply), never
flattened to prose and never dropped. A select's option text is
part of the source's innerText, so dropping the control fails
the byte gate with nothing structured to render from
(reference/content-model.md § Slot taxonomy, formControls);
- carries the metadata block verbatim into
<head> (title,
description, canonical, OG, Twitter, JSON-LD — including source
garbage like broken JSON-LD URLs: fidelity over repair; flag
such items for the human in the run report, never silently fix or
silently keep);
- takes its surface exclusively from
donor-tokens.json (emitted as
CSS custom properties) + the donor module patterns assigned in
mapping.md. Use the rendered-page conventions the Phase 5 probe
asserts against: content in <main>, .container for the measure,
.btn for the donor primary button (reference/gates.md
§ Rendered-page conventions);
- writes
stardust/reskin/pages/<slug>.html, self-contained.
Renderers may parse a single node's text apart (split a list-item row
into kicker/date/title) but must fail loudly (throw) when a parse
doesn't reproduce the node's text — a silent partial parse is a silent
content drop. A slot whose orderedVerified is false is inspected
before rendering, never trusted blind; when inspection shows stream
text genuinely absent from the slot's visibleText, the
sanctioned fallback is to drop that text before rendering and
record the drop in the model's provenance — filtering ghosts against
visibleText is the documented resolution, distinct from the
forbidden order-reconstruction move
(reference/content-model.md § When orderedVerified is false).
Phase 5 — GATES
Three gate families per page; commands, pass bars, tolerances, and
failure modes in reference/gates.md. Serve or file://-address the
rendered page and run:
(a) CONTENT GATE — all three must pass:
node stardust/scripts/reskin/dom-equality.mjs \
--source <page-url> --source-scope '<declared scope>' \
--normalize stardust/reskin/normalize/<slug>.mjs \
--rendered stardust/reskin/pages/<slug>.html --rendered-scope main \
--report stardust/reskin/reports/<slug>-content-gate.md
node stardust/scripts/reskin/slot-coverage.mjs \
--model stardust/reskin/content-model/<slug>/content-model.json \
--rendered stardust/reskin/pages/<slug>.html \
--report stardust/reskin/reports/<slug>-slot-coverage.md
dom-equality.mjs (vendored + adapted from github.com/aemcoder/skills,
Apache-2.0) gates on whitespace-normalized visible-text byte
equality and the ordered, URL-normalized visible-image set;
element count and tag sequence are reported but informational.
slot-coverage.mjs additionally proves every model slot present
(slot text substring, every CTA as a (text, absolute-href) pair,
every image) and asserts metadata carry-over field by field.
(b) DESIGN-ADOPTION GATE:
node stardust/scripts/reskin/donor-probe.mjs \
--tokens stardust/reskin/donor-tokens.json \
--rendered stardust/reskin/pages/<slug>.html \
--report stardust/reskin/reports/<slug>-donor-probe.md
Computed-style assertions of donor token values on the rendered page —
bg/fg, font-family token string, display weight, button spec,
container width, band palette, section rhythm. Tolerances (exact for
colors/radius/family; ±2px button padding; ±20px container; ±16px
section rhythm) documented in reference/gates.md § Tolerances.
Then the side-by-side judgment: open the rendered page next to the
donor reference-page screenshots (canon-source/assets/screenshots/)
and judge adoption with your eyes — the probe proves tokens, the
eyeball proves the page reads as the donor. Record the verdict.
(c) Sanity — no horizontal overflow at 1440 and 360 (donor-probe
runs this automatically; --widths to override).
One fix iteration per gate family — one for the content gate,
one for design-adoption/sanity. On a failure in a family, fix once,
re-run all gates (a fix for one gate can break another). Residual
failures after a family's iteration is spent are logged in
stardust/reskin/ledger.json under the page's residuals[] — never
silently absorbed, never looped on indefinitely. (Both field runs
support the budget: the validation experiment spent one iteration on
360px chrome; the smoke run spent exactly one per family — a
content-side separator emission fix and a sanity-side 360px chrome
fix. A single shared iteration would have forced a false residual;
per-family keeps the loop bounded without absorbing real failures.)
Phase 6 — HANDOFF
Reskin owns the archetype pages; scale and shipping are the existing
pipeline, unchanged:
- Scale via the stardust
migrate skill (../migrate/SKILL.md) with the
donor-pinned target (the state.json.designSource stamp Phase 1
wrote is exactly what direct/migrate read for donor pinning;
a bounded donor capture wrote no stamp — record the donor origin
in the handoff instead, reference/donor-sources.md § Two
first-class token-sourcing paths).
Same-type sibling pages render at the sibling tier against the
gated archetype. Content rules are the ones reskin already
enforces — ../migrate/reference/content-preservation.md is
inherited wholesale.
- Ship via the stardust
deploy and rollout skills, unchanged. Blocks
written for donor modules obey the Experience Workspace editability
contract (deploy SKILL.md § 8, EW1–EW10) and pass the EW gate
(block-roundtrip --ew) before they are done.
Reskin writes its own state under stardust/reskin/ — ledger.json
holds per-page status (captured → mapped → rendered → gated), gate
results, and residuals. It makes no changes to the core state
machine (../stardust/reference/state-machine.md); the only
state.json touch is the designSource stamp that extract itself
writes in Phase 1.
What reskin never does
- No content rewriting or summarizing. Not headlines, not body,
not CTA labels, not casing-by-editing. Faithful ≠ clean: source
garbage is carried verbatim and flagged, not fixed.
- No invented sections. Every rendered slot traces to a
content-model slot; every module traces to
donor-modules.md or an
explicit new-module entry in mapping.md.
- No donor-token drift. No colors, fonts, radii, or spacing
outside
donor-tokens.json. Licensed donor fonts are adopted as the
family token string with local fallback, never rebundled.
- No silent slot drops. Anything excluded from the gate scope is a
declared chrome delta or a ledger normalization — declared in
mapping.md, executable in the normalize module.
Stop conditions
- Donor capture fails (bot-block past the headed fallback,
prototypes dir unservable) — surface extract's error verbatim.
- Mapping ratio < 80% — the donor vocabulary can't carry this
content. Ask: widen the donor capture (more donor pages → more
modules) or accept a larger explicit new-module list.
- Scope undecidable — the content page's visible content cannot be
covered by any selector set (heavy shadow-DOM, iframe-embedded
content). Surface with the screenshot evidence.
- Figma donor requested — future scope; exact message in § Inputs.
Outputs
| Path | Purpose |
|---|
stardust/canon-source/ | Donor capture + descriptive DESIGN.md/json (extract --design-source, unchanged) |
stardust/reskin/donor-tokens.json | Curated probe-able token sheet, pinned to one reference page |
stardust/reskin/donor-modules.md | Enumerated donor module vocabulary (M1..Mn) with screenshot evidence |
stardust/reskin/content-model/<slug>/content-model.json | Byte-oriented per-page content model (+ source screenshot) |
stardust/reskin/normalize/<slug>.mjs | Per-page executable normalization ledger (shared capture ↔ gates) |
stardust/reskin/mapping.md | The mapping brief: every slot → donor module, status, rationale |
stardust/reskin/renderers/<archetype>.mjs | Programmatic renderers (model in, HTML out) |
stardust/reskin/pages/<slug>.html | Rendered reskin pages |
stardust/reskin/reports/ | Per-page gate reports + screenshots |
stardust/reskin/ledger.json | Per-page status, gate results, residuals |
stardust/scripts/reskin/ | Project-local copies of the five skill scripts |
References
reference/donor-sources.md — the three donor types and their
capture recipes; pin-one-reference-page; donor-tokens.json and
donor-modules.md contracts; the Figma future contract.
reference/content-model.md — the capture contract: slot taxonomy,
the ordered stream (the render surface), scope-discovery procedure,
normalization ledger format, provenance.
reference/mapping-brief.md — entry schema, the ≥80% gate,
new-module composition rules, casing policy.
reference/gates.md — both gates' commands, pass bars, tolerances,
failure modes, residual logging.
../extract/SKILL.md § Cross-site brand sources — the
--design-source donor-capture path Phase 1 delegates to.
../migrate/reference/content-preservation.md — the content rules
reskin inherits (and tightens to byte level).
../diff/SKILL.md — the pixel + structural probes; reuse them as a
supplementary build-side check after Phase 6 deploy, --profile eds.