The frontend pre-flight now reads the design handoff your team already wrote, instead of picking an aesthetic direction of its own. Point [design] output_dir at your design directory and it takes the aesthetic direction, the per-screen brief and the token taxonomy from there. Its own canonical reference list is now only the fallback, and only for a slot no artifact filled.
It keys on no section name inside your files. Design templates are scaffolds people edit, so a reader that looked for named sections would find nothing in most real documents — it takes the first heading, the frontmatter as it finds it, and the body whole.
A file under a read path that is not the artifact — a different type:, a draft, another kind of design record — is skipped and the scan continues. A design directory holding many kinds of document is expected, not an error.
When the directory is a personal vault or anywhere outside the repository, it asks you about each artifact before using it, and shows you what it found. Nothing in these files says which product they belong to, so that confirmation is the check — it is never reported as though a test had passed.
Every refusal stops the whole read and halts, by name. It does not tidy up a bad value, pick a different file, quietly downgrade to a skip, or fall back to the canonical list. [Read the design handoff](../../guides/frontend-engineering/how-to/read-the-design-handoff.md) says what each skip and each refusal means, and where the limits are.