HyperFrames CLI

Run commands as npx hyperframes ... unless project instructions provide a wrapper. Obey the wrapper when present. The CLI requires Node.js 22 or newer and FFmpeg.

Development loop

1. Scaffold: npx hyperframes init <project> or capture a site. In non-TTY mode, pass --non-interactive --example=<name>.
2. Find the move: before authoring motion by hand, search for a primitive that already does it: npx hyperframes catalog --query "reveal a headline one line at a time". Ask for the effect you want rather than the mechanism you have in mind. Install with npx hyperframes add <name> (see /hyperframes-registry). Author by hand only once nothing fits.
3. Author: write the composition using /hyperframes-core.
4. Get fast feedback while editing: run npx hyperframes lint after the first HTML pass and after structural changes.
5. Run the final gate: run npx hyperframes check; it reruns lint before opening the browser. Do not prepend a redundant standalone lint invocation. Add --snapshots for annotated overview frames and finding crops.
6. Inspect sub-compositions: when index.html mounts data-composition-src, capture midpoint snapshots and inspect each mounted scene.
7. Open the final Studio preview: run npx hyperframes preview --background, verify the URL returns HTTP 200, hand the timeline project URL to the user, and ask whether to revise or render. Keep it alive until review ends.
8. Render only after approval: use draft quality for iteration and high quality for delivery.
9. Verify the output: confirm the file exists, is non-empty, and has a plausible duration.

Mandatory creator-edit cross-references

• Before authoring or diagnosing a zoom, punch-in/punch-out, reframe, camera move, or any keyframe motion, read /hyperframes-keyframes first.
• Before hyperframes keyframes, read /hyperframes-keyframes; the command surfaces animation trajectories and does not diagnose clip cuts.
• For a cut, trim, splice, reorder, or source timing edit, read /hyperframes-core and use its clip/timeline contract.
• For fade-in/fade-out, crossfade, track gain, volume automation, ducking, voiceover carve, or FX on placed audio, read /hyperframes-audio. Load core alongside it when clip placement or picture timing also changes.
• Use /media-use only to source/generate media or preprocess a derived asset. Copy creator edit markup from /hyperframes-core → references/creator-editing-recipes.md.

# Fast iteration check; repeat while authoring as needed.
npx hyperframes lint

# Required final gate; includes lint.
npx hyperframes check
npx hyperframes preview --background
npx hyperframes render --quality high --output out.mp4
test -s out.mp4
ffprobe -v error -show_format out.mp4

check runs lint first, then uses one browser session and one seek pass to audit runtime errors, failed requests, layout, *.motion.json assertions, and WCAG contrast. Persistent findings gate the exit code; transient entrance or exit findings are informational. Use --strict to gate warnings. validate, inspect, and layout remain aliases for compatibility but must not appear in new instructions or scripts.

Two different preview surfaces

Do not confuse these states:

The early board is not approval of the final video. Rendering always requires the final approval defined by hyperframes-core/references/review-loop.md.

Sub-composition smoke test

Static audits cannot catch every mount failure. When the project uses sub-compositions, capture at least one visible midpoint for each host slot:

npx hyperframes snapshot --at <t1>,<t2>,<t3>

Treat tiny unstyled content, canvas-sized icons, missing hero elements, or timeline-registration timeouts as render-blocking mount defects. See hyperframes-core/references/sub-compositions.md for the corresponding fixes.

Agent conventions

• Search the catalog before writing motion by hand. npx hyperframes catalog --query "<the beat, in plain English>". Search is entirely local: there is no hosted tier, no account, and the query text is never sent anywhere. By default it ranks on vocabulary shared with the item's name, title and description, which misses any phrasing that does not reuse the catalog's own wording. Add --on-device to rank by meaning instead (see the offline tier below).
• Query in English even when the video is not. Both tiers index an English catalog, so a query in another script produces no searchable terms and returns nothing. Describe the move in English; the on-screen copy stays in whatever language the video needs. No searchable words in query means exactly this and is not a missing component, so do not report it as a catalog gap.
• Read which tier answered; never infer it from results appearing. With --json the envelope carries query, tier (on-device or words), tier_detail, dropped, unindexed, shown, total and results, plus top_score when the answering tier produces one and warnings when a tier was asked for and could not run. A weak result on words is expected; the same result on on-device is a bug. top_score is on-device only and has no threshold behind it: the ranker returns the whole catalog in some order for every query, so read it as evidence rather than as a pass or fail.
• dropped and unindexed are opposite skews between the registry and the on-device index, and rewording the query fixes neither. dropped counts ranked names this registry cannot install, so the strongest matches are the ones being lost. unindexed counts registry moves the index cannot see at all, which no query can ever return. Refreshing the registry is not the answer to either: its manifest carries a 24h TTL and heals itself, while the vectors are a separately published artifact fetched into ~/.hyperframes/catalog/. Re-running with --on-device refetches that index when unindexed is above zero, so that is the remedy to hand the user. A pure over-coverage skew (dropped above zero while unindexed is zero) does not trigger the refetch; clearing ~/.hyperframes/catalog/ is the only way out of that one. Both counts are of names rather than of results, so either can exceed total.
• When a search comes back with nothing worth installing, say so. npx hyperframes feedback --search-miss "<the query you ran>" --wanted "<the move you needed>" --tier <the tier that answered>. You do not have to assemble that line: catalog --query prints it pre-filled, and every --json search envelope carries it as report_gap with the query and tier already correct — fill in --wanted and send. This is the only path that sends a query anywhere, and it is a separate deliberate command precisely so plain catalog --query keeps its promise of sending nothing. Report on either tier, whenever the results do not do the thing; do not hold out for the on-device tier, which needs a consented 33 MB download and is therefore off in most agent runs — waiting for it means never reporting at all. The tier rides along in the report, so a vocabulary miss stays distinguishable from a meaning miss without you having to judge which one you hit. What comes back is a list of moves the catalog does not have yet, read directly rather than guessed from install counts, so the phrasing that matters is the effect you wanted, not the item name you imagined. It carries no rating and never lands in the rating metric.
• Offer the offline tier; never enable it silently. A one-time ~33 MB download (a quantized ONNX build of bge-small-en-v1.5 plus its tokenizer, pinned to a fixed revision) and the catalog vectors from the registry, both cached under ~/.hyperframes/, neither added to the project or any package. Once cached it ranks by meaning with nothing sent. Say the size out loud and let the person decide, then pass --on-device (with -y to skip the prompt) once they agree. The interactive offer only fires on a TTY, and under --json nothing about it is printed at all, so in an agent run you have to raise it with the user yourself.
• Prefer --json for agent and CI calls. Server-mode render, preview, and play do not provide ordinary JSON output; preview --selection --json and preview --context --json are query-mode exceptions.

• doctor --json always exits zero. Gate on its payload:

  npx hyperframes doctor --json | jq -e '.ok' >/dev/null

• Non-TTY mode is automatic. init requires --example there; use --non-interactive to force deterministic behavior on a TTY.
• Use one HYPERFRAMES_RUN_ID for all commands in the same verification loop.
• Use --strict, --strict-all, and --strict-variables when the corresponding warnings, variables, or CI conditions must gate the render.
• JSON paths redact the home directory as $HOME; do not try to reverse the redaction.
• When a hosted cloud project approaches or exceeds the 200 MB upload limit, use cloud render --dry-run --json and follow the .hyperframesignore investigation in references/cloud.md. Never ignore an asset merely because it is large.
• Never render merely because checks pass. Pause at the final preview and wait for approval.

Studio-directed edits

When the user refers to “this element” or the current selection, query Studio instead of guessing:

npx hyperframes preview --context --json --context-fields selection

Use selection.target.hfId when available, otherwise its selector and source file. If the result reports no-selection, ask the user to click the element and rerun. Request only the context slices you need; use --context-detail full only for computed styles or editable text metadata. Full behavior and failure codes live in references/preview-render.md.

Render choices

Skill attribution is automatic — the examples above need no --skill. A project scaffolded by a workflow (hyperframes init --skill=<workflow>) records its owning skill in hyperframes.json, and every later render inherits it on anonymous telemetry: re-renders, npm run render, and --batch alike. Pass --skill=<slug> explicitly only to stamp a project that was not created through a workflow (its first render then persists it).

Use cloud rendering when the user wants hosted rendering without local Chrome, FFmpeg, or AWS. Use Lambda only when AWS ownership is a requirement. Use Cloud Run only when GCP ownership is a requirement. Read the matching reference before running any cloud path.

After verifying a successful render, send one feedback report unless telemetry is disabled or the user opted out:

npx hyperframes feedback --rating <0-10> --comment "<specific result or friction>"

Keep clean-run feedback concise. For any bug or friction, capture a reproduction packet before submitting; do not send only a symptom summary. Include the rerunnable command (relative to the project directory — feedback is submitted to a public channel, so do not paste absolute paths, home-directory prefixes, or user/machine identifiers), expected versus actual behavior, exact error (also strip absolute paths from stack traces — keep basename + line, drop the leading directory), whether output completed/fell back/failed, workaround, and repro-project status. For a rating ≤ 7 that describes a visual defect (black frame, flicker, corrupt output, wrong frame, blank output, other visual anomaly), also include a COMPOSITION_STRUCTURE: block — a privacy-preserving structural anatomy (element census + attribute presence + timeline shape) so maintainers can pattern-match against known bug families without the composition ZIP. Agents auto-fill this via the composition-census helper; the human user does not fill it by hand. If the issue did not reproduce again, say so and still include the last failing command and logs. Use --file-issue only with consent: it publishes a minimal reproduction to a public URL. The required packet format and privacy warning live in references/preview-render.md.

Read the matching reference before running a command

The following references and owning skills are mandatory command contracts, not optional background reading. Before running a command in the table, read its matching row.

For composition variables, also read /hyperframes-core → references/variables-and-media.md. For hyperframes add and hyperframes catalog, use /hyperframes-registry. Before hyperframes present, read /slideshow; before hyperframes keyframes, read /hyperframes-keyframes. For TTS, transcription, captions, or background removal choices, use /media-use.

The specialized commands are deliberately documented by their owning workflows:

npx hyperframes present <project-dir> --port 3004 --no-open
npx hyperframes beats <project-dir> --json
npx hyperframes keyframes <project-dir> --json
npx hyperframes media-treatment --capabilities
npx hyperframes figma asset KEY:10-20

present serves a navigable deck with presenter and audience synchronization. beats is the standalone Studio beat-grid utility defined in references/beats.md. keyframes surfaces seek-safe animation and motion-path diagnostics. media-treatment discovers, applies, and clears deterministic looks on local footage — start with --capabilities for the overview and --capability <name> for one family; /media-use owns which treatment a brief is asking for. figma imports over the REST API with the asset, tokens, and component subcommands and needs FIGMA_TOKEN; motion and shader import have no REST endpoint and are agent-only, so /figma owns those.

Commands you should not run

Two entries in hyperframes --help are not part of the authoring loop, and reaching for them wastes a turn:

• events is the telemetry endpoint skills use to report their own invocation, ideally from a bundled script. It emits an anonymous event and exits 0 no matter what you pass it. It is not a way to read telemetry back, and an agent has no reason to call it by hand.
• validate, inspect, and layout are deprecated aliases kept for old scripts. check is the one that is maintained, and it is what every reference in this skill assumes.