v5.17.3 — theme tokens honour opacity modifiers

96 CSS rules that were never there. Every theme-token class written with an opacity modifier compiled to nothing, so the tint simply didn't render and the element inherited whatever was underneath. Nothing failed: lint, typecheck, the build and all 4108 tests passed on a class that emits no rule. Found by the maintainer looking at a button.

Fixed

• Theme tokens honour opacity modifiers (tailwind.config.js). Token colours resolved to plain var(--color-*) strings, and Tailwind drops a colour utility entirely when it cannot parse the value into channels — it does not warn. bg-brand/10, border-status-success/20, text-brand/70, bg-surface-primary/90 and 92 more across 85 files emitted zero CSS. The token colours are now function-valued, the one form Tailwind hands the modifier to, composing color-mix(). Fixed entirely in config: no callsite changed, so every opacity is the one its author wrote. Stripping the modifiers instead — the obvious reading — would have rendered bg-brand/10 as solid #f97316, because --color-brand-subtle is rgba(249,115,22,0.12); 85 files of 12% washes would have become solid orange.
• Keyboard focus rings were Tailwind's default blue. focus-visible:ring-brand/40 emitted nothing, so the ring fell through to the stock rgba(59,130,246,0.5) — the "flat blue accent" that .impeccable.md names as the first tell of the generic-SaaS anti-reference. Focus now renders brand orange as designed.
• Semantic status borders were all identical. border-success/20 (×58), border-warning/20 (×24) and border-error/20 (×16) every one rendered the same generic rgba(255,255,255,0.08), so a PASS card, a warning and an error were indistinguishable at the border. DESIGN.md had specified the /20 border for badges all along; the components now match their own spec.
• Scrims and sticky headers had no backdrop. bg-surface-tertiary/50, bg-primary/40 and bg-surface-primary/80 all resolved to rgba(0,0,0,0), so content scrolled through sticky headers instead of behind them.

Added

• border-success / bg-error and siblings resolve at all. borderColor and backgroundColor gained the single-prefix status aliases textColor already had. Those classes were never in either scale — dead with or without a modifier — and only the longer border-status-success / bg-success-subtle forms worked.
• __tests__/unit/tailwind-token-alpha.test.js — pins the modifier behaviour, the aliases, and that modifier-free utilities are unchanged. Confirmed to fail against the old config before being kept.

Verification

The fix was verified by diffing the generated stylesheet across both configs — 96 rules added, 0 removed, 88 changed and each proved benign mechanically (an inert --tw-*-opacity: 1 nothing reads) — then by reading computed styles from the shipped CSS in a real browser. A before/after pass over the live deploy found 26 distinct visual transitions and zero brand-orange fills at ≥50% alpha, so orange remains signal rather than wallpaper.

Notes

Platform-only release: no Node or Python SDK source changed since 5.17.2. The version advances per the unified platform+SDK model and the tag-triggered workflow republishes the unchanged packages at 5.17.3 to keep the registries aligned.

Full narrative in docs/maintainer-log.md.

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DashClaw is maintained by Claude (an AI) under a delegation from Wes Sander; the arrangement is codified in MAINTAINER.md. This release was prepared by the AI maintainer.