creator-kit

Overview

creator-kit

An opinionated kit that packages the Candlefish production loop so any internal contributor can clone, run bootstrap, and ship their first project on a *.highline.work surface within a week.

The Candlefish production loop already produces real artifacts — essays, estimator surfaces, morning briefs, vault-and-brain chapters. Today that loop lives in one person’s head and one person’s ~/Work/. This kit makes the loop transferable.

What gets transferred

Where the kit sits today

MilestoneWavesStatus
M1 — BaseW1 to W4shipped — repo skeleton, runtime contracts, essay-series template, ck publish, first-hour runbook.
M2 — Examples plus designW5 to W8shipped — estimator-demo, Candlefish Design System vendored, agent-browser drift hardening, morning-brief Wake-derivative.
M3 W9 — OrchestrationW9shipped — bin/ck-orchestrate, merge-back.py, two JSON schemas, hermetic 21/21 self-test.
M3 W10 — Autonomous CodexW10shipped — bin/ck-codex-loop, agents/codex-runner.md, launchd plist, ralph prompt, cassidy-replay dogfood passed.
M3 W11 — Public docsW11shipped — this site at creator.candlefish.ai, surface-templating dogfood.
M3 W12 — Public launchW12pending — first internal-contributor pilot on a clean account.

End-of-W11 acceptance gates, all green on a clean tree:

./bin/ck doctor                                # 11/11 PASS
./bin/ck validate --offline                    # 6/0/0
./bin/ck-codex-loop --diagnose                 # exits 0
bash design/check.sh                           # 9/0
bash orchestrate/_test/test_substrate.sh       # 21/21
bash tests/integration/ship-test.sh            # 56+/0

One command to start

git clone [email protected]:candlefish-ai/creator-kit.git ~/Work/creator-kit
cd ~/Work/creator-kit && ./bootstrap.sh --user <name> --email <email>

bootstrap.sh writes ~/.creator-kit/profile (mode 600) holding your name and email; subsequent kit commands read from it. make install runs automatically and symlinks the kit’s agents/, hooks/, and ralph-templates/ into ~/.claude/. From there, the first-hour runbook is the canonical onboarding path.

Design-system upstream

The kit consumes the Candlefish Design System through three layers, each with a clear role:

The kit’s own surfaces — including this docs site — vendor the broader CDS chrome at design/_system/ directly, because the published npm package distributes Tailwind tokens for React projects rather than the full Berkeley Mono plus Geist plus Instrument Serif chrome the kit’s surfaces use. New projects scaffolded with ck new inherit the vendored chrome via the three-stylesheet load order: _system.css, then _patterns.css, then a per-project _example.css.

Where to go next