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Documentation Index

Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://doc.getrationale.app/llms.txt

Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

Rationale’s audit reads your design screens as images and cross-references every pixel against the requirements in your PRD. It surfaces missing empty states, undefined error paths, contradictory copy, and unanswered edge cases — before any of those gaps become engineering surprises.

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What the audit checks

The audit reads your Figma frames alongside your PRD and looks for places where the two don’t fully align.

Missing states

Screens that lack empty, loading, or error states required by the PRD.

Undefined error paths

Flows that the PRD mentions but the designs don’t show an outcome for.

Contradictory copy

Labels, button text, or instructional copy that contradicts the PRD’s language or logic.

Unanswered edge cases

Edge conditions surfaced from the PRD that have no corresponding design treatment.

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Running an audit

1

Open your project

Open an existing project or create a new one. Make sure the active version has at least one design screen uploaded and a PRD attached.
2

Trigger the audit

From the project workspace, click Run audit. Rationale sends your screens and PRD to the audit engine, which reads the designs as images and extracts requirements from your PRD text.
3

Review results across tabs

Once the audit completes, the results panel organizes findings into five tabs. Work through each tab to understand the health of the version before approving it for development.

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The result tabs

The Summary tab gives you an overall health score for the version: how many requirements are cleared versus how many still have blockers. It also shows entry points, core user flows, and business rules inferred from the PRD. At the bottom, you approve the version for development from this tab — approving locks the requirement list and unlocks the Dev Handoff tab.
The Requirements tab lists every requirement extracted from the PRD, each with a clearance status: Met, Partial, or Missing. You can filter by status to focus on the items that still need attention. Where a requirement is met by a specific screen element, the matched element name is shown alongside a thumbnail of the relevant screen.
This tab groups specific problems into three categories: Screens (logic gaps with severity ratings), Missing states (uncovered edge cases from the design), and Accessibility (WCAG-grounded checks). Each gap includes a description of the problem and a suggested fix.
A space to capture design decisions, open questions, and context that belongs with the version but doesn’t fit neatly into requirements or gaps. Notes here travel with the version and appear in the exported handoff document.
The Dev Handoff tab is locked until you approve the audit. Once approved, it surfaces the cleared requirements and edge-case coverage in a payload engineers can consume. You can also export the full handoff as a Word document from this tab — see the Dev handoff page for details.

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Approving the audit

When you’re satisfied that the gaps are understood and the version is ready for engineering, click Approve for Dev on the Summary tab.
Approving locks the requirement list for the current version and immediately unlocks the Dev Handoff tab. This approval is stored per project so the state persists if you navigate away.

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Pushing findings to Linear

You can push the full audit — or a single finding — to Linear as issues without leaving Rationale. Full audit push: From the audit results, open the Linear push modal. Select the team, project, and sprint cycle, assign an owner (with optional per-screen overrides), then click Push to Linear. Rationale creates one parent issue and one sub-issue per open gap and uncovered edge case. If you’ve pushed before, re-pushing syncs the existing issues: new gaps are added, resolved gaps are marked resolved, and items already marked Done in Linear are cleared from the audit automatically. Single finding push: Click the Linear icon next to any individual gap or edge-case row to create a single scoped issue without a parent or sub-issues.
Re-pushing an audit after fixing issues will update existing Linear issues and resolve ones that are no longer flagged — you don’t need to manage the Linear issues manually.

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Figma live watch

You can link a Figma file so Rationale automatically re-audits the project every time you save a named version in Figma. Paste the Figma file URL into the Linked Figma file panel to enable watching. See the Figma integration page for setup details and how the watch behaves when multiple versions are active.