designcraft/AGENTS.md

DesignCraft — instructions for agents

DesignCraft is a clean-room, open-source, Rust-native page-layout application targeting Adobe InDesign parity — and superiority (speed, openness, agent control). It runs natively on macOS, Windows and Linux, and on the web via WASM. Siblings with the same conventions: ../drawcraft (Illustrator-class), ../photocraft (Photoshop), ../printcraft (Acrobat), ../filmcraft (Premiere), ../lightcraft (Lightroom).

Start every session here

1. Read plan/STATUS.md (current milestone, next task), then the task in plan/execution-plan.md and the relevant plan/architecture.md section. Behaviour reference: plan/indesign/*.md (11-observed-ui.md holds measured observations of the running app).
2. Follow the autonomous operation protocol (plan/execution-plan.md §7). Don't stop to ask unless §7 lists the decision as the user's.

plan/ is gitignored (local only).

Non-negotiables

• Clean-room. InDesign is installed on the dev machine and may be observed black-box: run it, use its UI with synthetic documents, take screenshots (by window id) stored only under plan/indesign/screenshots/ (never committed). Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the InDesign bundle (names/listings only), never copy Adobe icons, artwork, presets or wording beyond feature names, never commit files produced by InDesign. Never copy GPL/AGPL/LGPL code (Scribus, LibreOffice, Ghostscript…).
• Assets: no Adobe iconography or images — ever. Every asset is original / OSI / CC0 / redistributable CC and has a row in ASSETS.md (cargo xtask assets enforces it). Prefer art generated in code.
• Everything is a command. User-visible behaviour = a command in crates/engine/src/cmd/* (id, label, menu path, shortcut, params doc, enabled, run) + tests. Tools emit commands (Begin/Preview/Commit). UI-only commands live in crates/ui-egui/src/menus.rs (UI_COMMANDS). The control channel and MCP reach all of them.
• Layering is enforced by cargo xtask layers. Nothing below L6 depends on egui/eframe/winit/rfd. The UI crate is swappable.
• The UI is thin: panels read engine state and act through app.run(id, params). Colours come from theme::Tokens.
• Rust only (no handwritten JS/TS). Never break wasm (cargo xtask wasm).
• Quality gates before every commit: cargo xtask ci (fmt, clippy -D warnings, tests, assets, layers, wasm). One task id per commit (M2.1: type tool caret navigation).

Running and looking at the app

• cargo run --release -p designcraft -- --sample --control 7979 (sample magazine + control channel).
• Drive it: JSON lines on 127.0.0.1:7979, e.g. {"id":1,"method":"engine.execute","params":{"command":"frame.create","params":{"rect":[36,36,300,200],"content":"text"}}} then {"id":2,"method":"ui.screenshot","params":{"path":"/tmp/shot.png"}}. Methods: crates/ui-egui/src/control.rs, docs: docs/control-protocol.md.
• For UI work, look at the result (take ui.screenshot, read the PNG) and compare with plan/indesign/02-ui-ux.md / 11-observed-ui.md. If no frame is presented (screen locked) use ui.render or designcraft-cli run --sample --all-pages DIR.
• Headless: designcraft-cli run --sample --cmd 'frame.create={"rect":[0,0,100,100]}' --export out.png.
• Shell gotcha: mv/cp are aliased interactive here — use /bin/mv -f / /bin/cp -f.
• Parallel agents: separate CARGO_TARGET_DIR per agent; edit only the crates you own; delete your target dir when done (disk).

Roadmap

ROADMAP.md (committed) tracks status, milestones and estimates. Update it whenever a milestone task lands.