creator-kit

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

Two-agent setup. Claude lane for synthesis, prose, and strategy; Codex lane for verifiable loops, route checks, tests, and browser evidence. Every claim is labelled source-backed, inferred, or demo-only.
Agent-runtime contracts. A docs/agent-runtime/ first-context brief plus the cross-agent baton, machine-checkable docs/contracts/*.json claims, and a stdlib-only PASS/FLAG/FAIL validator that runs offline and live.
Surface templating. Basic-auth FastAPI server template, launchd plist, cloudflared ingress rule. ck publish wires them so a project goes from local checkout to a live *.highline.work surface in under 90 seconds.
Design system. The generated Candlefish tokens (design/_system/tokens.css and aliases-cds.css, versioned copies from tokens.candlefish.ai), plus a kit-authored semantic-tokens layer at design/_patterns.css, plus fourteen ready-to-use HTML/JSX component templates and a 9-gate design/check.sh.
Autonomous web sessions. agent-browser (in the Candlefish dotfiles tree) gives any agent persistent-profile access to web consoles that do not expose proper APIs.
Multi-agent orchestration. ck orchestrate <task> spawns parallel git worktrees per agent with disjoint file ownership; merge-back.py runs a pairwise-disjoint check plus an octopus merge into a review branch. It never auto-merges to main.
Discipline. Conventional commits, dated ledger, strict drift-row format, five-section CLAUDE.md per project, dogfooded validators on every wave.

Where the kit sits today

The table below is rewritten by bin/doc-autosync every 15 minutes against the kit’s live state — the validator’s PASS/FLAG/FAIL count, the main head, and the M3 W12 status flag all reflect what the orchestrator’s most recent cycle saw.

Milestone	Waves	Status
M1 — Base	W1 to W4	shipped — repo skeleton, runtime contracts, essay-series template, ck publish, first-hour runbook.
M2 — Examples plus design	W5 to W8	shipped — estimator-demo, Candlefish Design System vendored, agent-browser drift hardening, morning-brief Wake-derivative.
M3 W9 — Orchestration	W9	shipped — bin/ck-orchestrate, merge-back.py, two JSON schemas, hermetic 21/21 self-test.
M3 W10 — Autonomous Codex	W10	shipped — bin/ck-codex-loop, agents/codex-runner.md, launchd plist, ralph prompt, cassidy-replay dogfood passed.
M3 W11 — Public docs	W11	shipped — this site at creator.candlefish.ai, surface-templating dogfood.
M3 W12 — Public launch	W12	pending — first internal-contributor pilot on a clean account

Validator: -1 PASS / -1 FLAG / -1 FAIL. Head: 52a65131 — design: the vendored system becomes two versioned token files; _patterns.css over the aliases; no serif; docs site redep. Last refresh: 2026-09-12T01:48:37Z.

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            # 60/0

One command to start

git clone git@github.com: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 as generated files, not as a package:

Source: design-system/tokens/tokens.json (Candlefish Ultramarine 2.0.0, ruled 2026-09-11: white ground, black ink, Ultramarine #1A44EA as the one accent, Geist 200/300/400/500 and Berkeley Mono, no serif). The generator there writes every mirror.
Host: https://tokens.candlefish.ai/v2.0.3/ (immutable) and /latest/. The kit carries versioned copies of two files, tokens.css (the --ds-* values, the faces, the light, dark and deep themes) and aliases-cds.css (the design-system v1 names resolved onto --ds-*). design/sync.sh refreshes them.
Semantic layer: design/_patterns.css, kit-authored, reads the alias names and gives templates intent (--surface-fg, --emphasis-accent, .ck-*).

Every kit surface, this docs site included, loads the four sheets in order: tokens.css, aliases-cds.css, _patterns.css, then a per-project _example.css. New projects scaffolded with ck new get the kit’s current versioned copies.

Where to go next

Quickstart — the first 60 seconds.
First-hour runbook — clone to live surface in under one hour, on a fresh macOS account.
Publishing deep-dive — what ck publish does, where it can fail, and how to fix each failure mode.
Templates — three ready-to-fork starting points: longform writing, synthetic permit-set estimator, multi-connector daily brief.