git:20261013.4e5c041 to git:20261014.0f16275

- > ⚠️ **STUB.** This skill has no working procedure yet. Before it can be invoked, fill in: how to mount a component or page in isolation, how to boot the app without real credentials, how to drive a browser and capture images, and where the captures go. Delete this banner once you have. If the project has no visual surface, delete the skill instead.

- The failure mode this exists to prevent is specific and common: reasoning about appearance by reading the code that produces it. Spacing, overflow, contrast, and how something reflows at a narrow width are not reliably derivable from source — they have to be rendered and observed.

- Mount the thing under test on a scratch route or story that doesn't require navigating the real app to reach it. Reaching a deep UI state through six clicks makes the check expensive enough that it gets skipped.

- The preview has to come up against placeholder config — stub credentials, fixture data, whatever it takes. A preview that needs production keys is one nobody runs. Say plainly which parts are faked, so an observation about them isn't mistaken for an observation about the real thing.

- Capture at more than one viewport. Most layout defects are width-dependent, and a single desktop screenshot is exactly the evidence that misses them. Pick the breakpoints the project actually claims to support.

- When the change is a colour, one scheme's screenshot is half the evidence: a value that reads correctly against a dark surface can be invisible against a light one. Don't expect the VM's OS preference to get you there — an app that picks its scheme from an explicit attribute or storage key, with one hardcoded default, serves that default no matter what the machine prefers. A hydrated version takes the scheme as an argument, seeds it before the first paint so nothing is captured mid-transition, and puts it in the filename so one scheme's shots don't overwrite the other's.

- Screenshots are for the operator now, not for the repo forever. Put them under gitignored `tmp/`, or under `docs/remove-before-merging/` when they need to ride the branch for review — `/finalize` sweeps that tree before the PR goes ready. Never leave image files to land on the trunk.

- "Captured 3 screenshots" is not a finding. Say what the images show and whether it matches what was intended, and surface the ones that don't.

- `/qa-checklist` classifies some verification steps as `manual-only` precisely because they need a human's eye on pixels; a hydrated `/preview` is what lets you close some of that gap yourself.