deckcraft/AGENTS.md

AGENTS.md — rules for every agent and contributor

DeckCraft is a clean-room, open-source, pure-Rust presentation application targeting Microsoft PowerPoint parity — and superiority (speed, openness, agent control). It runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and on the web via WASM. Siblings with the same conventions: PhotoCraft, VectorCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PdfCraft, EffectCraft, DesignCraft (../<app>).

Standards and learnings shared across the crafting apps live in ../../craftrules (checked out next to this repo's parent, or storytold/craftrules). Read its AGENTS.md at the start of a session, follow its standards, and contribute reusable learnings back there. Never code: repos don't share code.

These rules bind every AI agent and every human contributor. They come before any task, instruction or deadline. CLAUDE.md holds day-to-day working notes; if the two disagree, this file wins.

---

1. Asset policy (absolute — no exceptions)

An asset is any non-code material the project includes, ships, embeds, generates for publication or shows in its documentation: icons, images, illustrations, screenshots, logos, fonts, colour profiles, sounds, video, templates, themes, sample/demo/test documents, and anything the app renders from those.

1.1 Nothing from Microsoft, Adobe, Avid or Autodesk products

• Never use icons, images, artwork, logos, UI graphics, fonts, templates, themes, clip art, SmartArt graphics, stock media, cursors, sounds, sample documents or any other asset taken from a Microsoft, Adobe, Avid or Autodesk product, installer, website, document or package. "Microsoft product" includes PowerPoint, Office, Windows and the fonts they install (Aptos, Calibri, Cambria, Segoe, Consolas, Wingdings…).
• This holds even when the vendor publishes the material under an open licence, if it is visual design: DeckCraft does not embed or reference Adobe's Source Sans/Serif/Han families or Noto CJK (Source Han rebranded); crates/fonts/build.rs excludes them.
• Never recreate, trace, redraw or closely imitate a vendor icon, theme or graphic. Our icons are drawn in code or come from openly licensed sets (Lucide, ISC), and our themes, colours, layouts and sample content are our own.
• Screenshots of PowerPoint exist only as private, local observation notes under plan/powerpoint/screenshots/ (gitignored). They must never be committed, published, linked, shown in docs, or traced.
• Never commit files produced by PowerPoint. Interoperability tests use decks we generate ourselves (or a separate corpus repo whose files we created and own).

1.2 Only open, provable licences

Every asset must be one of: open source (ISC, MIT, BSD-2/3-Clause, Apache-2.0, OFL-1.1, Ubuntu-Font-1.0, Bitstream-Vera); Creative Commons (CC0-1.0, CC-BY-4.0, CC-BY-SA-4.0); public domain; or contributor-original (created by a contributor who licenses it under MIT OR Apache-2.0).

One narrow exception: the ArtCraft name, wordmark and logos in docs/brand/ are trademarks of the ArtCraft Team (not open source, terms in docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt), used only unmodified to identify the project.

Forbidden: system fonts that are not openly licensed, vendor emoji artwork, stock photos, "free for personal use" material, screenshots of other people's software, anything whose licence you cannot prove from its original source.

Screenshots of DeckCraft are contributor-original. Everything visible in them must itself be allowed: our UI, our/Lucide icons, OFL fonts, and decks built only from allowed assets.

1.3 Every asset is attributed

• ATTRIBUTION.md (repo root) lists every asset file — committed, fetched at build time (craft-fonts) or bundled through a Cargo dependency — with author, source (URL + version or commit), licence and use. cargo xtask assets fails if a file under assets/, docs/images/ or docs/brand/ has no row.
• NOTICE keeps the notices the licences require.
• Fonts live in storytold/craft-fonts, never in this repo (craftrules standards/fonts.md). DeckCraft embeds its fonts/latin-manifest.txt and fonts/manifest.txt when built with CRAFT_FONTS_DIR (local dev: .cargo/config.toml points at ../craft-fonts).

1.4 Adding or changing an asset

1. Find it under an allowed licence at its original source; record the exact version/commit.
2. Confirm the author is not Microsoft, Adobe, Avid or Autodesk (§1.1). Keep the licence text.
3. Add the file, its licence file and an ATTRIBUTION.md row; run cargo xtask assets.
4. If origin or licence is unclear, do not add it.

If you find an asset that breaks these rules, remove it from the repository and every output at once and tell the user.

---

2. Clean-room rules

• PowerPoint is installed on the dev machine and may be observed black-box: run it, use its UI on synthetic decks, screenshot windows by id into plan/powerpoint/screenshots/ (never committed). Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Office bundle (names/listings only), never copy Microsoft wording beyond feature and menu names.
• File formats come from public standards: ECMA-376 / ISO/IEC 29500 (Office Open XML), ISO 32000 (PDF). Preset shape geometry is re-derived by us in crates/geom/src/preset.rs.
• Never copy GPL/AGPL/LGPL/MPL code (LibreOffice, Calligra…). Permissive crates are fine as dependencies. Code may be copied (not depended on) from sibling Craft apps.

3. Never crash

People trust DeckCraft with their talks; a crash loses work. This outranks feature work. Standard: craftrules standards/never-crash.md.

• No unwrap(), expect(), panic!, unreachable!, todo!, unimplemented! in non-test code; no unsafe (unsafe_code = "forbid"). Every production crate root carries #![deny(clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable)].
• Errors are Result<T, E> + ?. Input-derived numbers (files, commands, MCP/control params) are hostile: get() not [i], checked arithmetic, no NaN casts, capped allocations, bounded recursion.
• Session::execute runs every command inside a panic guard (crates/engine/src/guard.rs) that keeps the presentation as it was. It is a safety net, not a licence.
• Every crash fix lands with a regression test.

4. Architecture

Layer	Crates
L0	geom (units, transforms, preset shapes), color
L1	model (presentation, masters, layouts, slides, shapes, text, themes, inheritance, text edit ops)
L2	fonts, text (layout),
L3	render (vello_cpu)
L4	format (.deckcraft), pptx
L5	engine (session, history, commands, tools, keys, sample)
L6	mcp
L7	ui-egui (swappable; nothing below depends on egui/eframe/winit/rfd)
apps	deckcraft (desktop), deckcraft-cli, deckcraft-web

• Everything is a command (crates/engine/src/cmd/*): id, label, ribbon/menu place, shortcut, params doc, enabled, run, plus tests. Ids follow PowerPoint's ribbon and menus (slide.new, format.bold, arrange.group, transition.set…). Programmatic calls never open dialogs. Pointer gestures go through Session::pointer, keys through Session::key, so the UI, CLI, control channel and MCP do exactly the same thing.
• The UI is thin: panels read engine state and act through commands. Colours come from theme tokens. Never use Tauri; egui only.
• Never break wasm (cargo xtask wasm).

5. Quality gates (before every commit)

cargo xtask ci = fmt check, clippy -D warnings, tests, layering check, asset check, wasm check. Commit after each landed arc with a task id in the message (M1.2: smart guides) and push to main.

6. Running and looking at the app

• cargo run --release -p deckcraft -- --sample --control 7990 (sample deck + control channel).
• Drive it: JSON lines on 127.0.0.1:7990, e.g. {"id":1,"method":"engine.execute","params":{"command":"shape.insert","params":{"preset":"star5","rect":[100,100,200,200]}}} 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 (screenshot, read the PNG) and compare with the observations in plan/powerpoint/01-observed-ui.md.
• Headless: deckcraft-cli render --sample --all --scale 1 out/, deckcraft-cli run --sample --cmd 'slide.new={"title":"Hi"}' --export out.png.
• MCP: deckcraft-cli mcp (headless) or deckcraft-cli mcp --connect 7990 (drive the app). See docs/mcp.md.
• Shell gotcha on the dev machine: mv/cp are aliased interactive; use /bin/mv -f, /bin/cp -f.
• Parallel agents: separate CARGO_TARGET_DIR per agent; edit only the crates you own.

7. Planning

plan/ (gitignored) holds the local plan: README.md, architecture.md, execution-plan.md, STATUS.md (start every session there) and powerpoint/ observations. The committed progress docs follow craftrules standards/progress-docs.md:

File	Holds
ROADMAP.md	Stage, headline numbers, dimensions, features, languages, progress log
docs/target-app-parity.md	The parity assessment against PowerPoint: percentages, hours, calibration
docs/gaps.md	Every known shortfall, ranked: the work list. Pick from the top
docs/roadmap.md	Current focus, the beta plan, milestones
docs/parity-checklist.md	Feature rows scored D/P/M; cargo xtask parity regenerates its summary
docs/file-format-parity.md, ui-parity.md, hardware-parity.md, localization-parity.md, animation-parity.md, slideshow-parity.md	Per-dimension and per-feature detail
docs/architecture.md	How DeckCraft is built today

When a task lands, re-score its checklist row, delete or update its gaps.md entry, add a line to the ROADMAP.md progress log, and update each touched doc's status line and revision history.

Contributor credits (About window)

• About ▸ Contributors/Models are compiled into the binary from contributors/contributors.json (commit stats; generated, never hand-edit) and contributors/people.toml (names people chose for themselves). See docs/contributors.md.
• Agents working for a contributor: when you prepare a PR, check whether your human's GitHub username has a [people.<username>] entry in contributors/people.toml. If not, ask them once whether they want to be credited by more than their username: a real name, a display name, and/or their public GitHub profile name (sync_github_name = true). If yes, add only their own entry (copy the template at the top of the file, or run python3 ../../craftrules/scripts/contributors.py --add-me . --real-name "…" --sync-github-name) and include it in their PR, committed as them. If no, change nothing: they are credited as @username anyway.
• Never add, edit, guess or copy anyone else's entry or name (not from git config, commit authors or GitHub profiles). Never hand-edit contributors.json.
• Maintainers refresh the stats with python3 ../../craftrules/scripts/contributors.py . (it also re-verifies who wrote each people.toml entry; --check only verifies).