I know kung fu.
In the Matrix, they upload kung fu straight into Neo's head; he opens his eyes, says “I know kung fu,” and Morpheus answers, “Show me.” A spectastic knowledge corpus is the unglamorous, auditable version: commit the domain facts your specs need, and a decision that used to be a guess becomes a cited, edition-pinned fact. The tell is one attribute in a design — ASSUMED flips to grounded. Below, you can flip it yourself.
Spectastic already demands that every design-bearing fact in a design cite a source. But before the corpus, every source it could name lived in the repo — so a domain fact (a regulation, a standard, a settlement window) had nothing external to point at, and could only ever be graded assumed. The corpus supplies the missing thing to cite: committed, greppable markdown under knowledge/, each document carrying a stable KB-NNN id. Cite one, and the fact can finally be verified.
Before grounding
A real, small feature: a mobile action bar — a row of icon buttons. The design needs one domain fact: the minimum interactive target size. Ask a model cold and you'll usually get 44×44 CSS px, stated with confidence. It's the wrong criterion — that's Apple's Human Interface Guidelines figure and WCAG 2.1's AAA bar. The AA floor, introduced in WCAG 2.2, is 24×24. The model doesn't know what it doesn't know.
The ungrounded design
The design decides a target size with nothing external to cite. It renders ASSUMED — spectastic's loud, visible-failure affordance for a design-bearing fact resting on a guess. The build isn't blocked, but the badge is impossible to miss in review.
Load the pack — “I know kung fu”
spectastic init scaffolds a knowledge/<pack>/ folder; if you already keep a markdown KB, spectastic corpus adapt frontmatters it. Here the pack is web-a11y/, and its one document distils the WCAG target-size rule — the exact fact the model lacked.
Cite it — the fact gets corrected
/spectastic.design grounds the decision by citing KB-0001@2023-10-05 — the id pinned to the exact edition read. The grounding flips to verified, and the number is corrected from 44 to 24. Grounding didn't just add a badge; it fixed a confident error. Flip it below.
The gates hold the line
Pinning is load-bearing. spectastic validate fails the build on a citation that resolves to nothing (corpus-provenance) and warns when a pin points at a superseded edition (corpus-staleness). A cited fact can't rot into a dead reference, and a stale one can't hide.
Show me
This is the real design decision, rendered by spectastic's own grounding CSS. The toggle flips one attribute — grounding — exactly as citing KB-0001 does. Watch the badge, the number, and the source line.
D-001 · Minimum interactive target size
- Status
- Accepted
- Grounding
- Context
-
The action bar's icon buttons need a minimum hit target. The reflexive answer — 44×44 CSS px — is Apple's Human Interface Guidelines figure and WCAG 2.1's AAA criterion. There's no committed source to cite, so this rests on the model's memory.
The action bar's icon buttons need a minimum hit target. WCAG 2.2 introduced SC 2.5.8 Target Size (Minimum) at Level AA: 24×24 CSS px, with spacing, inline, and essential exceptions. 44×44 is the separate AAA bar (SC 2.5.5). Grounded against
KB-0001@2023-10-05. - Decision
- Set the minimum interactive target to 44×4424×24 CSS px. Baseline taken from the reflexive 44×44 figure. Meets WCAG 2.2 SC 2.5.8 (Level AA); treat 44×44 (AAA) as an enhanced target for primary actions, not the baseline.
- Source
- — none; no corpus to cite. KB-0001@2023-10-05 — WCAG 2.2 SC 2.5.8, Target Size (Minimum), Level AA.
AA min
AAA
The card above uses spectastic's real spec-decision[grounding] rendering; the toggle only flips the grounding attribute. In a project you don't flip it by hand — citing KB-0001@2023-10-05 in the design is what earns the green.
Read the corpus
No vector database, no runtime index — a corpus is committed markdown, shaped as an Agent Skills folder so it's portable across agents. The one document here carries provenance frontmatter and a stable id.
The gates hold
The toggle above illustrates. This is the real check. With the corpus present, spectastic validate resolves the citation and runs the grounding gates — and it's green.
Typo the pin to an edition that doesn't exist and the build fails — a citation can't rot into a dead reference.
Pin to the superseded 2018 edition and it warns — loud, like an assumed decision, but never blocking.
The artifacts
A self-contained bundle: the web-a11y corpus pack and the mobile-action-bar spec & design that cites it. Every file is real and passes spectastic validate.
These are the real, rendered artifacts — the same files spectastic validate checks; the excerpts above are drawn from them verbatim.