Check your visual changes mid-edit

uiverify check is the interactive preview build — the agent edit-loop counterpart to the CI
uiverify upload. You're mid-task, you've changed a component, and you want to know now whether it
changed anything visually and whether that change is intended — without opening a PR, waiting for CI, or
touching a baseline.

It renders on the same fleet and diffs against the same resolved CI baseline a real build would,
so the answer is authoritative (not a local macOS screenshot that won't match Linux). But it's walled off
from CI:

• No GitHub check — invisible on the PR.
• Never advances a CI baseline. Accepting a preview build writes a branch-scoped preview baseline,

A changed verdict exits 0 — it's the expected result to review, not a gate. Only a real failed/blocked
or an operational error exits non-zero.

The one rule: scope it to what you touched

This is the whole point, and it's the opposite of CI. CI computes the transitive affected set from the
dependency graph — editing one primitive can mark a third of the suite affected. That's correct for CI
(it writes the baseline and can't under-render) but useless in an edit loop: it's slow, expensive, and
drowns the signal you actually want.

So you choose what to render — the stories for the component you're editing, plus the specific
places it matters, not everything the graph lights up. Under-scoping is safe here: a preview build is
never a baseline, so the worst case is you didn't preview a story you didn't ask about, and the
exhaustive CI build catches it later. Name the few things that matter.

Prepare the capture, then check — per method

check is a dumb HTTP client: it uploads what you built or captured and asks the fleet to render it.
It does not run your build or your tests for you — you prepare the capture input first, exactly the
same input the matching capture skill produces (storybook-visual-testing, playwright-visual-testing,
vitest-visual-testing), then point check at it.

UIVERIFY_API_KEY (a uv_proj_… project key) must be set. All four methods take --strict/--no-strict
and --working-directory like uiverify upload.

Storybook — --target is required

Storybook builds the whole suite (there's no single-story build), so you must name what to render.
The build is monolithic; only the named stories actually render on the fleet.

npm run build-storybook            # or: storybook build --stats-json
uiverify check --static-dir storybook-static --target 'components-button--*' --target 'pages-checkout--default'

Pass --target per id; each is an exact story id (components-button--default) or an anchored glob
(components-button--). Render the component you changed plus the one or two pages where it actually
appears — not the whole components- tree.

Playwright / Vitest archives — --target optional

Run only the tests you care about to produce the capture archive, then check it. The archive already
contains just those captures, so the uploaded artifact is the render set — no --target needed.

# Playwright: run only the specs you touched, producing the archive
npx playwright test tests/checkout.spec.ts
uiverify check --static-dir <archive-dir>
# Vitest browser-mode component tests: run only the touched files
npx vitest run src/components/Button.test.tsx
uiverify check --static-dir <archive-dir>

You can still pass --target to narrow further (it matches the capture/test ids the SDK emitted, e.g.
--target 'checkout/'), but the usual discipline is "run the tests you want, then check the archive."

Raw screenshots — --target optional

Upload exactly the PNGs you produced (native / mobile / React Native, or any surface we don't render).
The upload is inherently scoped to the screens you took.

uiverify check --screenshots ./screenshots

Narrow with --target against the image path keys if you want (--target 'settings/'), but it's optional.

Read the verdict, then hand off to triage

check prints the changed-story list and an MCP handoff. When it comes back changed, don't eyeball
the diff numbers alone — use the triage-visual-changes skill to review the actual pixels over the
UI Verify MCP (get_diff / render_diff_image), bucket real regressions vs cosmetic reflow vs noise, and
accept the baselines you mean to keep. Accepting establishes the branch-scoped preview baseline, so a
re-run of check comes back clean for the change you just approved while a fresh change still flags.

Rule of thumb for the loop: edit → check the few things you touched → triage the diff → accept what's
intended → keep editing. The exhaustive answer still comes from the real CI build on your PR; this is the
fast, scoped preview that keeps you moving.