Design work — structure before pixels, and a gate that catches garbage

The failure this exists to stop: asked to design an app, an agent went straight to high-fidelity HTML and produced gradient placeholders — because it skipped the structure and skipped the real tools. Two rules fix it.

Run /multica-ops:mops process before drawing anything. Design is the clearest case for process-discovery (PLAYBOOKS): for a UI it typically surfaces information architecture → user flows & journeys → low-fi wireframes → owner approves the structure → high-fi → design system — but Mops discovers that per project rather than hardcoding it, and the owner cuts or adds steps. Low-fi comes first on purpose: approving structure on cheap artifacts saves the tokens and days that redrawing finished screens costs, and it is where the owner's taste enters before it is expensive to change.

Tool each surviving step, or name it a gap — not one flat "designer" skill list. Search by the step's own function: a flow library (Mobbin) for user flows & journeys, a wireframing approach for low-fi, a component library (Pen.dev / Shadcn) for high-fi. Flows that ship land on the product map (_ops/MAP.md, /multica-ops:mops map) — the design gate checks against it, and a persona walk's "sequence of steps" is read off it. Present the steps as a table with a tool-or-gap column (PLAYBOOKS process-discovery) so none can go silent: a step that turns up no tool is written gap in that cell, never hand-drawn and never left blank — the flows step going silent because the skill list only covered high-fi is exactly the miss this catches.

Ask the design intake up front — never guess it. Before a pixel: style and mood · colour direction · references the owner likes · anti-references (hard no). An agent that asks only "what stack?" and starts drawing has skipped the questions that decide whether the output is theirs or generic. This is part of the control level (SKILL → interview): at checkpoints or hands-on, the owner sees and signs the structure before high-fi begins.

Compose, don't hand-draw. Screens are assembled from a component library (Pen.dev, Shadcn — STACKS → where design is drawn), not written as one-off HTML. Hand-written screens are both slower (2–5 min each) and worse; a library makes a screen composition, not generation.

The design gate rejects, it doesn't rubber-stamp. A review that passes bad design is not a review. The gate checks the work against the approved structure, the intake and the design system — mismatch fails it — and Mops never signs off design itself: the owner does, at the checkpoint their control level set. "It rendered" is not "it's good."