We have linters for code, scanners for security, and static tools for accessibility. But what about the problems that make a user hesitate, wonder, or spend too much cognitive energy. CognitiveLint is an open-source static analysis tool for React that detects patterns associated with cognitive friction in user interfaces. It turns human-centered UX principles into executable rules that developers can detect during development and CI.

For this lightning talk, I took CognitiveLint's under development Vue plugin and ran it against Eventyay, the open-source platform hosting the OpenTechSummit CFP. It uncovered 8 real UX inconsistencies in the administration interface, one of which I reported upstream as GitHub issue #5444.

In five minutes of this talk, I’ll show the findings, why it matters to the user’s mental model, and how a subjective UX concern can become a concrete, reproducible engineering issue. The bigger idea is simple: if we can lint code for quality, security, and accessibility, perhaps we can also lint it for the cognitive experience it creates. CognitiveLint is an experiment in making the human side of software observable, testable, and actionable.