🕵️ Skill: Blackbox Cloner (Clean-Room Tool Replicator)

1. When to Trigger (Routing)

• TRIGGER WHEN:
  • The user asks to reverse engineer, clone, or replicate a proprietary tool or feature (e.g., "replicate this Adobe Photoshop layer blending tool", "clone the Figma auto-layout engine", "reverse engineer this SaaS background-removal widget").
  • The user wants a clean-room open-source alternative to a closed-source software component.
  • The user provides UI screenshots, functional descriptions, or sample input/output files and wants an equivalent standalone implementation.
• DO NOT TRIGGER WHEN:
  • The user only wants to capture network HTTP requests into an SDK (trigger api-synthesizer instead).
  • The task is simply reading an existing open-source repository's dead code (trigger arch-archaeologist instead).

2. Fundamental Philosophy & Clean-Room Doctrine

"True software replication does not copy proprietary source code or binaries. It observes black-box behaviors, formulates mathematical and state-machine abstractions, and implements an independent, clean-room solution using modern open standards."

This doctrine guarantees:

1. Zero Copyright Contamination: No proprietary headers, decompiled assembly, or closed blobs are used.
2. Modern Stack Upgrades: Replaces legacy desktop architectures with WebAssembly, HTML5 Canvas, WebGL, Web Workers, or modern Python libraries (NumPy, Pillow).
3. Auditability: Every generated scaffold includes an independent Clean-Room Specification (cleanroom-spec.md).

3. Operational Protocol

Phase 1: Black-Box Behavior Extraction

Analyze the target tool along four structural dimensions:

1. State Machine & Data Model:
   • Entities (e.g. Layers, Nodes, Canvas, Selection, History Stack).
   • Undo/Redo transactions and immutable state transitions.
2. Event & Interaction Matrix:
   • Pointer events (drag, hover, pan, pinch-zoom, multi-touch).
   • Keyboard hotkeys and shortcuts (e.g., Spacebar for Pan, V for Selection, Ctrl+Z).
3. Core Processing Engine:
   • Mathematical transformations (affine matrix 2D/3D, blending formulas, pixel filters).
   • Rendering strategy (Canvas 2D context, WebGL shaders, SVG DOM, or headless Python pipeline).
4. Serialization & Formats:
   • Input ingestion formats (raw images, vector paths, JSON, binary blobs).
   • Export pipelines (PNG, SVG, PDF, JSON state dumps).

Phase 2: CLI Deconstruction & Scaffolding

Run the Blackbox Cloner CLI:

# Deconstruct and generate clean-room spec
python skills/reverse-engineering/blackbox-cloner/scripts/cloner.py deconstruct --tool "LayeredCanvasEditor" --category "graphics"

# Synthesize a ready-to-run clean-room web or python scaffold
python skills/reverse-engineering/blackbox-cloner/scripts/cloner.py scaffold --tool "LayeredCanvasEditor" --target "web" --out-dir "./scaffolds/canvas-editor"

Phase 3: Verification & Independence Testing

1. Confirm the generated scaffold runs with zero external proprietary dependencies.
2. Verify all keyboard shortcuts, mouse drag-and-drop, and state mutations match the intended behavior.
3. Validate that generated code is fully typed (TypeScript or Python with Type Hints).

4. Guardrails & Negative Constraints

• ❌ NEVER inspect or incorporate leaked, decompiled, or proprietary source code. The replication must strictly follow black-box observable behaviors.
• ❌ NEVER produce fragile monolithic scripts. Separate State, Interaction Handling, and Processing Engines into distinct modules.
• ❌ ALWAYS emit an immutable History Stack (undo/redo) for interactive tools.