Task and audience framing
Understand the real job, reader, stakes, ambiguity, and human authority.
The ideal state
Perfect means the right human outcome, not maximum autonomy.
A perfect system may act independently, ask for a definition, preserve a human decision, or refuse. The correct behavior depends on purpose, stakes, evidence, and authority.
Data, semantics, and provenance
Preserve measures, joins, units, filters, uncertainty, permissions, freshness, and source lineage.
Visual construction fidelity
Make transformations, marks, encodings, labels, layout, and rendering correct.
Visual interpretation and reasoning
Read ordinary and difficult charts, multiple views, documents, and domain conventions.
Integrity critique and uncertainty
Detect misleading or unsupported claims and know when the evidence is insufficient.
Iterative steering and repair
Expose state, accept local edits, branch, revert, and avoid regression.
Interaction, responsiveness, and accessibility
Survive browser state, phone layouts, keyboard and assistive paths, export, and authentication.
Reader and decision outcomes
Improve comprehension, retention, decisions, calibrated trust, or learning for actual people.
Production efficiency, governance, and maintenance
Remain worthwhile, governable, updateable, and transferable across the artifact lifecycle.