An open critic for the Claude Skills catalog. Built by RampStack.
Basano is an open critic for the Claude Skills catalog, built by RampStack. It reviews a finished build against a standard and reports what holds and what fails. It reads the claude-skills catalog, selects the verification skills a review needs, runs the review, and returns a structured verdict: the failures, prioritized by severity, and the parts that hold, so the verdict is trustworthy in both directions.
The name comes from the Greek basanos, the touchstone: the stone against which gold was rubbed to test whether it was genuine. That is what Basano does to a build.
This repository documents what Basano does and shows worked examples. The critic is operated by RampStack.
- Scopes the review. Turns a build and a standard into the areas worth checking: SEO, accessibility, code quality, performance, content, and others as the build calls for.
- Selects the verification skills. For each area, it picks the relevant audit and review skills from the catalog, the same selection the catalog uses elsewhere, so the review maps to skills that actually check that dimension.
- Reports a verdict. It synthesizes findings into a structured result: what fails, ordered by severity with the reason it matters, and what holds. Not a raw issue dump, a prioritized verdict.
A critic is only worth having if its judgment is trustworthy in both directions. Basano is built so that:
- A failure is never softened into a pass or a minor note. If an area fails the standard, the verdict says so, with severity.
- What cannot be assessed is marked as such, never quietly counted as a pass.
- A verdict reads "passes" only when every assessed area holds. A passing verdict that carried a real failure is structurally impossible, it cannot be constructed, not merely discouraged.
That is the point of the tool: its "this holds" is trustworthy because its "this fails" is unsparing.
Basano reports; it does not fix. The fix is the human's call.
- Landing page passes production-ready - a clean pass, with the holds surfaced rather than assumed.
- Landing page fails on accessibility - a high-severity failure leads the verdict, a low-severity one follows in order, two areas hold, and one area is honestly marked as not confidently scoped.
Basano is built by RampStack, which maintains the open claude-skills catalog Basano reviews against.
- RampStack: rampstack.co
- The catalog: github.com/rampstackco/claude-skills
Basano is the name of RampStack's open critic, in active use since 2026. The name and its associated branding are used in commerce by RampStack. This documentation, dated and public, is part of that record.