Bootstrap a content agent

You are turning this kit into a working, project-specific content agent. Work in phases. Do not skip the interview — the answers drive everything you generate.

Phase 1 — Read the method

Read docs/01-architecture.md and docs/03-conventions.md in full. Then skim docs/02-playbook-spec.md, docs/05-publishing.md, docs/06-scheduling.md, docs/07-review-gate.md, docs/08-audit-maintain.md, docs/10-crawl-discovery.md and docs/11-social-posting.md. If the agent will make video, also read docs/20-video-backends.md; if it will use skills or connectors from elsewhere, docs/17-skills-registry.md and docs/18-ads-and-marketing.md. Internalize the six parts (playbook / knowledge / state / scripts / discovery / schedule) and the non-negotiable conventions (env-only, review-gate, idempotent, cleanup).

Phase 2 — Interview the user

Ask (batch related questions; propose sensible defaults):

1. Domain & goal — what content, for whom, published where?
2. Item types & schema — what kinds of items (article / long serialized / case / …), and the exact fields each needs. Get one concrete example per type.
3. Cadence — how many per day; rotate phases? (phase = day mod N).
4. Publish target — is there an ingest API? Base URL + endpoint paths + auth. If none, is it social-only?
5. Discovery — should it crawl sources for ideas (crawl4ai)? If yes, list a few source index pages + the article-link pattern. (Copyright: excerpt+link only.)
6. Social — post to Make.com/n8n/Zapier? Which platforms (tiktok / youtube_shorts / facebook_reels / instagram_reels / plain page posts)? Media host (Cloudinary/Catbox)? 6b. Video — does this agent make short videos as well as (or instead of) text+image? If yes: how many per week; channel name + brand URL for the outro; which TTS provider (a cloud key is enough — only omnivoice needs a local server); whether scenes should use real footage (needs a Pexels or Pixabay key) and screenshots (needs nothing extra — Chrome is already required); and where finished video is hosted (r2 is the default; never catbox for anything published). Confirm the render machine has FFmpeg and Chrome — GitHub Actions cannot do this step at all (docs/06-scheduling.md). 6c. Personal or business? This picks a profile (VIDEO_BACKEND plus profiles/personal.json or profiles/business.json): backend, voice, palette, brand slots and a spend ceiling. Both default to the free html backend — only move to api for a deliberate hero video, never for a daily queue (Veo bills $0.40/s, so a 60-second video is $24).
7. Scheduling — GitHub Actions cron / Windows schtasks / manual?
8. Access tiers — free/login/paid split; anything forbidden. 8b. Measurement (optional) — do they run ads for this content? If yes, .mcp.json has Pipeboard servers for Meta/Google/TikTok/Snap/Reddit and the ads-report skill turns what they report into next week's queue. Warn them those connections are read AND write on live accounts. 8c. Images (optional) — do they need campaign visuals rather than stock photos? Canva's MCP is declared in .mcp.json, and the design-campaign skill exports a file, not a Canva link. Ask which plan they are on: resize needs Pro, autofill needs Enterprise, so the canvas size has to be decided before designing.
9. Voice & craft (do not skip — this is what makes output not read like AI):
   • Publication language + tone; who is the implied author?
   • One register per content type — how should each sound, and how do they differ?
   • Which clichés/phrases are overused in this language & genre? (get 5–10 concrete ones)
   • Any hard genre contract? (e.g. mystery fair-play, journalism sourcing, brand rules)
   • Ask for 1–2 samples they consider good — you'll mine them for the before/after pairs.

Phase 3 — Scaffold (generate into the user's project)

From templates/ + scripts/, produce:

• PLAYBOOK.md — fill templates/PLAYBOOK.template.md with the interview answers.
• WRITING_CRAFT.md — fill templates/WRITING_CRAFT.template.md (see docs/12-writing-craft.md). Start from templates/INDUSTRIES.template.json. Find the user's vertical, and use its post.types to fill the register sections, post.proof to define what evidence looks like here, and post.avoid for the banned list. If the entry has a legal block — healthcare, finance and property all do — copy those rules in with their source links. They are the difference between a post that is merely weak and one that costs a fine. Write it in the publication language, one register section per content type, a concrete banned-cliché list, and 2–3 BEFORE/AFTER pairs you author yourself (never copy copyrighted prose). End with the §7 rubric using countable fail thresholds. This file is what stops the output from reading like AI — do not skip or stub it.
• KNOWLEDGE.md — fill templates/KNOWLEDGE.template.md with the real API contracts.
• .env.example — only the env keys this agent needs (copy from kit .env.example, trim).
• State: history.json, ledger.json (if serialized), queue.json — start from the examples in templates/state/.
• Scripts: copy the needed ones from scripts/ (publish/append/update/queue-client/ social/scheduler/crawl). Adjust default endpoint paths (--path / QUEUE_PATH) to the user's API. Do NOT hardcode secrets — env-only.
• Video (if chosen in 6b):
  • VIDEO_CRAFT.md — fill templates/VIDEO_CRAFT.template.md, written in the publication language. §5 (voice + banned narration clichés) is the part only the user can answer; §2's number table stays as-is for Vietnamese, and must be rewritten for any other TTS language.
  • Copy scripts/video/ AND scripts/media/ (whole folders, including their lib/), plus video-templates/ (all templates and every NOTICE.md — attribution is a licence condition — and the root NOTICE.md too). Without scripts/media/ the render cannot resolve B-roll or screenshots and cannot upload anything.
  • Copy templates/VIDEO_SCRIPT.template.json as the writer's starting point, templates/VIDEO_GENRES.template.json (scene sequences for review / tutorial / news / listicle / testimonial — it answers "which frames, in what order", which the catalogue does not), and templates/stock-sources.yaml.template if they want clips from sites with no API.
  • Copy the chosen profile from profiles/ and set its brand fields from the interview. Leave a brand field EMPTY rather than guessing — an empty slot is dropped, a guessed one is published.
  • Add to the generated .env.example: TTS_PROVIDER + that provider's key copied verbatim from the kit's .env.example (vbee's is VBEE_TOKEN, not VBEE_API_KEY — this exact mismatch shipped once and made vbee unusable for anyone following the docs), MEDIA_HOST (default r2) + its keys, PEXELS_API_KEY / PIXABAY_API_KEY if using B-roll, and SOCIAL_PLATFORMS.
  • Tell them to run node scripts/media/host-check.mjs and node scripts/video/tts-check.mjs before the first real render — both fail loudly on a misconfigured key, which is much cheaper than finding out mid-render.
• Discovery (if chosen): sources.yaml from the template + crawl.py + the cron workflow from templates/workflows/crawl.yml.template.
• schedule-prompt.md — from the template, wired to this agent's phases.
• On Claude Code: copy the runtime skills into .claude/skills/: daily-run, review-gate, crawl-and-queue (if crawling), audit-and-fix, plus create-video and video-and-post and research-and-capture if the agent makes videos, topic-radar + daily-topic-video if the agent works from a topic the user names each morning rather than from a crawled queue (they need no keys — every source is keyless — and daily-topic-video is the whole radar→video→publish chain in one ask), ads-report (it works with no ad spend too — pasted numbers), repurpose if they publish to more than one channel, geo-optimize if anything they publish is meant to be found — it carries scripts/geo-audit.mjs, which gates a draft on whether a passage still means anything once an answer engine quotes it alone — and design-campaign if Canva is connected. new-template and motion-craft belong in a kit checkout rather than a generated agent: they edit video-templates/ and the gates around it, which a downstream agent does not own.
• Skills from elsewhere (optional): node scripts/install-skills.mjs --list shows an SEO auditor, design skills, Opus 5.5 code-video & media skills (opus-55-videos, opus-video-skills, opus-video-styles, motion-video-kit, explainroo, video-lens), and marketing skills, fetched on demand rather than vendored. Suggest seo and mkt-context (plus opus-55-videos and opus-video-styles for video agents) as the ones with the broadest payoff. On Antigravity, tell the user the scheduled task should say "Read PLAYBOOK.md and execute today's phase".

Phase 4 — Wire & verify

• node -c each generated .mjs; python -m py_compile crawl.py if present.
• Run each script with --help to confirm it loads (env-only; missing env → clear error).
• Check one real caption through node scripts/social/validate-post.mjs <file> --strict. Captions render no Markdown, so a ## heading or a Meta:/Slug: block reaches the reader verbatim. make-post.mjs refuses to send text that fails, so a writer who does not know this will hit the wall at publish time rather than at write time.
• Grep the generated project for accidental secrets (see docs/09-security.md).
• Show the user: the file tree created, how to fill .env, and how to trigger the first run.

Guardrails

• Never hardcode a secret. If the API needs a token, reference an env var and add it to .env.example.
• Always include the review gate in the generated PLAYBOOK §2b.
• Copyright: if crawling, excerpt-only + original writing; prefer public-domain.
• Never leave someone else's brand in a slot default. Templates ship with empty brand fields on purpose: an empty slot is removed, a leftover one is published on the user's video. This has been fixed twice; do not reintroduce it.
• Look at the output. After the first render, run contact-sheet.mjs and actually look. Two templates once rendered landscape inside a 9:16 video with the render succeeding and the validator passing — only the contact sheet caught it.
• Keep it "little but high quality" — a tight cadence beats volume.

Antigravity note: this file is also a plain instruction doc. Follow the phases directly; "copy skills into .claude/skills/" becomes "keep the SKILL.md files as reference docs the scheduled agent reads."