First review checklist

Run this before civitai app submit — by hand, or hand the page to your agent. Each item is one line of what to check and one line of why. It links to the page that owns the detail rather than repeating it.

The same review feedback came back on app after app; every item below is one of those.

1. Audit before polish

• Walk every view in four states: cold-open, empty, populated, narrow (≈360px). Cold-open is before your data and bundle have loaded — it is the first thing a reviewer and a new viewer see.
• Check the empty state against the live backend, not the harness. The mock host's synthetic replies and any demo seed data prove the populated path; they say nothing about a real account with nothing in it. See Local dev loop.
• Look for dead ends. From every state, the next step should be obvious without reading anything.
• Only then do a theme pass — and offer the human two or three palette options before applying one. Re-theming a layout you will still restructure is wasted work, and the palette is a taste call, not yours.

2. Declutter

• Exactly one filled/solid primary action per screen, reserved for send/spend. When everything is primary, the one that costs Buzz stops standing out.
• No explainer cards ("What's an X?"). If the UI needs a manual, fix the UI.
• Don't repeat your app's own title. The host listing already names it.
• Consolidate tabs into one view, or a sidenav — see the sidenav pattern.
• Hide controls the current state doesn't need. Show them when they become usable.
• Collapse empty sections instead of pre-rendering their frames.

3. Visual hierarchy

• Layer surfaces instead of one flat background — page on --civitai-color-body, panels on --civitai-color-surface / --civitai-color-surface-2, separated with --civitai-color-border where the values are close. Check both palettes in Design tokens.
• Keep the palette subtle. Let colour mark state and the primary action, not decorate.
• Show media larger rather than as chips. In an image app the image is the content.
• Full-width layouts that still work at 360px. That is the model sidebar's width as well as a phone's — see Responsive blocks.

4. Theme

• Dark is the default, light comes only from the host's theme signal (reflect BLOCK_INIT's theme onto data-theme), and your own palette goes on the --civitai-* token layer — see Light and dark themes.

5. Money path honesty

• Show the exact Buzz price before spend: estimate → consent → submit → watch — see the useBuzzWorkflow lifecycle and, for consent, app.requestGrants or useRequestConsent in the hooks reference.
• Render your own error copy, never raw server text. Branch on the refusal's code / reason (refusal tables). A refused submit's error string is for your logs, not the screen (refused submits).
• A disabled or gated action names what is missing, and recomputes live as fields fill. A press that silently does nothing reads as broken.
• One idempotency key per attempt, reused on every retry of it — see Retrying a submit safely and the key's charset.

6. Submitting

• Run civitai app validate first. It mirrors most of the approve-time checks in a second.
• Batch every fix into one submission. An app has one pending submission at a time, and there is no editing it — the only way to change a pending bundle is to withdraw and resubmit.
• Submit the next version only after the current one clears review.
• Before you withdraw anything, read what withdrawing does to the store listing. It is irreversible for a first version.

7. After approval

• Open https://<slug>.civit.ai/ in the cold-open state — signed out or on a fresh profile, nothing cached — and walk it once.
• Don't read "Not live yet" as "not serving". Depending on your CLI version, civitai app status <slug> may describe only your newest submission. A pending, withdrawn or rejected newest row prints "Not live yet" even while an earlier approved version is serving. Confirm what is live by opening <slug>.civit.ai cold, as above. See Tracking a submission.
• Deployed ≠ listed in the store — see Deployed is not the same as listed.