Introduction
These are Sam Carlton’s house front-end preferences — the deltas from how a model defaults to front-end work. They’re a thin layer that sits on top of general front-end skills (production-quality component/layout mechanics, polish, motion), bending the defaults toward how Sam actually likes the work done.
The throughline
Section titled “The throughline”Adapt-don’t-invent · preserve-don’t-rewrite · restraint over flash · prove-it-in-a-real-browser.
A model left to its defaults will hand-write markup from imagination, rewrite working code into “cleaner” structure, over-animate, drop in placeholder images, and stop at a plausible-looking draft. These preferences push the other way on each of those.
Where they came from
Section titled “Where they came from”They were distilled from a client WordPress + Nectarblocks rebuild — a Dockerized WordPress reconstruction of a Workers prototype, where the work rewarded copying known-good block patterns, preserving structure, matching a reference target with restraint, and finding real defects in browser QA. The concrete origins and gotchas are on the WordPress / Nectar lessons page; the eight preferences generalize them beyond WordPress.
How to read this site
Section titled “How to read this site”- The eight preferences — the core, each framed base default → Sam.
- How to apply — the order to work in and the bar for “done.”
- WordPress / Nectar lessons — read only when the task touches WordPress or Nectarblocks.
- Changelog — how this guidance has evolved.