[ryan-stoffel]

Problem

Parallax's UI works but reads busier and flatter than it should: light mode text is tinted navy, the sidebar spends more color than the thread, the cards that need you are gray, Stop is a loud red-orange circle, and primary buttons come in three styles. A three-model design council scored the baseline 6.8 to 7.3 out of 10.

Fix

A polish pass modeled on pingdotgg/t3code#25251: structure stays neutral, and color is kept for identity (project and agent icons), action and state (the accent blue), and meaning (green done, red failed, amber needs you). The council re-scores fresh screenshots after each round until every delegate gives at least 9/10.

Round 1:

• Light mode text, borders, and fills are neutral gray. The dark canvas is true black (#000), with cards and the composer a step above.
• Approval and secret cards get an amber border and an amber "Needs approval" / "Needs a secret" label. Their transcript lines are amber while they wait.
• Stop is a neutral circle, the same shape as Send.
• Sidebar: rail tiles have no resting fill; a folder's Done is only its check; zero diff counts are gray; a PR's number is gray beside its colored icon; the provider logo shows its own color.
• Onboarding's primary button is blue like every other primary, with no glow and no focus ring at rest.
• Bold is 600 everywhere. Enriched Markdown lists show their bullets again (Tailwind's base styles had removed them). A brief's headings stay under the side panel's title.
• Settings row actions are outlined buttons and General's selects share one width. Usage's average moves into the chart's caption, off the bars.
• "Done" dividers carry a green check, and the child view drops a redundant back arrow.

Linear: https://linear.app/ryanstoffel/issue/PLX-1042/ui-polish-overhaul

Acceptance criteria

• Screenshots of the main views in dark and light are in the PR
• Each council delegate scores the final screenshots at least 9/10, with the rounds recorded here
• pnpm check passes in apps/desktop
• pnpm test passes in apps/desktop

Council review

Each round, 18 screenshots (9 views, dark and light, 1440×900 at 2x) from the renderer preview go to three delegates, who score ten categories: hierarchy, typography, color, spacing, consistency, contrast, density, component polish, dark mode, light mode.

Delegate	R0 (baseline)	R1
Claude Opus 5.5	6.8	…
Codex GPT-6.1 Sol	7.3	…
Claude Fable 5.1	7.3	…

Validation

Round 1:

Testing

pnpm check passes. Screenshots come from apps/desktop/preview driven by Playwright.

Changes made by Claude Opus 5.5 in Claude Code, running in Parallax.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code

[ryan-stoffel]

Closing for now. Ryan is pausing the UI polish overhaul.