House rules

These apply in every Craft repository. A later rule may be stricter, not weaker. The source is standards/house-rules-core.md in storytold/craft-contrib. Propose changes there, not in a copy.

1. A person is accountable. Whoever runs an agent answers for what it opens and for its review comments.
2. Check, then claim. Before writing code, read the issue comments, search pull requests for #N and the keywords, and check recent commits on main. Comment on the issue first. Release a claim you will not finish.
3. Verify, don't guess. Open a definition before using it. Confirm the cause in the code, even when someone names a location.
4. Keep fixes narrow and tested. Fix what the issue describes, where the bug is. Add a test that fails without the fix.
5. Review the diff before opening a pull request. Identifiers exist as used, the test fails without the fix, nothing unrelated changed, and the description is true.
6. Look for a better pull request. If another fixes the same thing, close yours when it is better or equal, and say why.
7. Report only what ran. Say what you tested and what you could not run. Without a local build or test, say so and rely on CI before marking ready.
8. main changes through a pull request. Do not push to it. Branch protection enforces this. There is no exception.
9. Stop and ask only about licensing outside the allowlist, publishing, releases, a new remote, secrets, spending money, destructive git, and anything else hard to undo. Otherwise keep working. plan/ is a gitignored notebook, not rules. Without it, do not ask for it and do not stop.
10. Keep secrets and personal details out of the repository, logs and requests.
11. CI stays shared. Workflows call storytold/craft-common-actions. Do not change CI in a feature or fix pull request. If CI cannot cover a change, open an issue there.
12. Guards say why. A check that looks removable says what it prevents. Read that before changing it.
13. Instructions must be readable by everyone. No notes about one machine, and no links to files a reader cannot open. craftrules is retired. Do not link to it.
14. Keep pull requests moving. Concurrent pull requests are fine; unanswered actionable feedback is not. Respond in 7 days, a reminder at 14, closure eligible at 30, from when an actionable request waits on the author. Suggestions and unconfirmed bot findings do not start the clock. A fix, explanation or agreed plan resets it; unrelated activity does not. Waiting on a reviewer or maintainer pauses it and does not count against the author. A maintainer decides closure; it is never automatic. Reuse search results, do not poll, and stop at a rate limit.
15. No agent attribution. A pull request does not say an agent wrote it. A repository rule may not require that.

Rust Craft repositories

These apply to native Craft apps and to shared Rust libraries. Select them by repository type. A repository that merely contains some Rust does not take this block. Rules later in a repository's file may be stricter, but not weaker. The source is standards/house-rules-rust.md in storytold/craft-contrib.

1. Never crash. Non-test code does not panic and has no unsafe, except where the repository file names an exception. Return errors, treat input as hostile, and bound recursion and allocations. New production crate roots copy the deny attribute from an existing crate: clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable. Every crash fix comes with a test that panicked before the fix.
2. Clean room. Learn from observed behaviour and public specifications. Do not copy another product's code, assets, strings or artwork. Check a dependency's licence before adding it.
3. Assets and fonts. Every asset is original or suitably licensed, and is recorded in ATTRIBUTION.md in the same change. Font files live in storytold/craft-fonts, not in the app repository.
4. Rust only for native Craft apps. No handwritten JavaScript or TypeScript, and no Tauri, Electron or webview shell, in those apps. Shared tooling follows its documented technical scope and maintainer-approved exceptions. Craft PR Review's existing Tauri and TypeScript UI is one such exception. It does not relax this rule for native apps. Preserve any existing web build.
5. Time goes through chrono. Do not hand-roll calendar conversion. For dates beyond what chrono can represent, follow standards/time.md.
6. Contributor credits. Add or edit only your own person's entry in contributors/people.toml, and only after asking them. Never guess a name or hand-edit contributors.json.

Licence allowlist

Dependencies and assets use SPDX identifiers. An expression is allowed when every identifier is in this list. A repository may name a shorter list. It may not add an identifier here by editing its own copy of these rules.

• ISC
• MIT
• BSD-2-Clause
• BSD-3-Clause
• Apache-2.0
• OFL-1.1
• Ubuntu-font-1.0
• Bitstream-Vera
• CC0-1.0
• CC-BY-4.0
• CC-BY-SA-4.0
• LicenseRef-Public-Domain

LicenseRef-Storyteller-Trademark is not in this list. It covers Storyteller brand marks only, where a repository already says so.

SoundCraft — instructions for agents

SoundCraft is a clean-room, open-source, pure-Rust digital audio workstation targeting Avid Pro Tools parity — and superiority (speed, openness, agent control). It runs natively on macOS, Windows, Linux and FreeBSD, and on the web via WASM. Siblings with the same conventions: ../photocraft (Photoshop), ../vectorcraft (Illustrator), ../filmcraft (Premiere), ../lightcraft (Lightroom), ../pdfcraft (Acrobat), ../effectcraft (After Effects), ../designcraft (InDesign).

Start every session here

Read ROADMAP.md for stage, status and the parity numbers, and pick work from docs/gaps.md. The progress docs are docs/target-app-parity.md (assessment), docs/gaps.md, docs/roadmap.md, docs/ui-parity.md, docs/file-format-parity.md, docs/hardware-parity.md, docs/plugin-parity.md, docs/localization-parity.md; docs/parity-checklist.md is generated. Update their timestamps and revision history when you change them. plan/ is an optional gitignored notebook (plan/protools/ holds an observed menu tree and screenshots, never committed). Do not ask for it and do not stop when it is absent.

⚠️ Assets: the absolute rule

No Avid, Pro Tools, Adobe or other proprietary iconography, images, sounds, presets or artwork — ever. This is not negotiable.

• Every icon in SoundCraft is drawn in code (crates/ui-egui/src/icons.rs) or is an original/open asset.
• Every bundled asset (image, icon, sound, font, preset) must be original, public domain (CC0), or under a permissive open license (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, OFL, CC-BY with attribution), or contributed by someone who made it and licenses it openly.
• Every bundled asset gets a row in ATTRIBUTION.md (path, author, source, license) in the same commit that adds it. cargo xtask assets enforces this; CI fails otherwise.
• Never copy files out of the Pro Tools bundle (/Applications/Pro Tools.app): no plugins, presets, icons, sounds, session templates or text. Observing the running app (screenshots kept under plan/, menu names) is fine; copying its resources is not.
• Demo audio is synthesised in code (crates/engine/src/demo.rs). Demo and README media must be ours or public domain.
• The ArtCraft trademarks in docs/brand/ are the only exception, under docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt.

Clean-room

Pro Tools is installed on the dev machine and may be observed black-box: run it, use its UI with synthetic sessions, take screenshots by window id (screencapture -l <id>), stored only under plan/protools/screenshots/. Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside the Pro Tools bundle; never copy Avid icons, artwork, plugin names, presets, or wording beyond feature names. Never copy GPL/AGPL/LGPL code (Ardour, Audacity, LMMS, Freeverb sources…). Our plugins have our own names.

Never crash

People trust SoundCraft with their recordings; a crash loses takes. This outranks feature work.

• No panics in non-test code: no unwrap(), expect(), panic!, unreachable!, todo!, unimplemented!; no unsafe (unsafe_code = "forbid").
• The one named exception is soundcraft-clap-host (crates/clap-host), the isolated unsafe helper crate for CLAP plugin FFI: unsafe_code = "deny" crate-wide, allowed only in src/ffi.rs with a // SAFETY: comment on every block, safe Result API.
• The same exception, same rules, for soundcraft-vst3-host (crates/vst3-host), the isolated unsafe helper crate for VST3 plugin FFI (COM vtables via the vst3 bindings, module loading, host-side COM objects).
• And for soundcraft-au-host (crates/au-host), the isolated unsafe helper crate for Audio Unit FFI (hand-written AudioToolbox/CoreFoundation declarations, macOS only; a safe stub elsewhere).
• Errors are Result<T, E> + ?. An unfinished feature returns an "unsupported" error.
• Input-derived numbers are hostile (files, commands, MCP/control params): get() not [i], checked/saturating arithmetic, no NaN casts, cap allocations.
• The audio callback never blocks, allocates in steady state, or panics.
• Every production crate root carries #![deny(clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable)].
• Engine::execute catches escaped panics and restores the document. Every crash fix lands with a regression test.

Architecture (layers enforced by cargo xtask layers)

Nothing below L6 depends on egui/eframe/winit/rfd. The UI is thin: panels read engine state and act through engine.execute(id, params).

Everything is a command

User-visible behaviour = a command in crates/engine/src/cmd/* (id, label, menu path, shortcut, params doc, enabled, run) + tests. UI-only commands (windows, dialogs) live in crates/ui-egui/src/menus.rs (UI_COMMANDS). Menus, shortcuts, the CLI, the control channel and MCP all dispatch the same ids. Programmatic calls never open dialogs; only menu-style invocation (ui.menu.invoke) does. New commands go in a new module with its own specs(), registered by one line in cmd/mod.rs.

Parity is measured, not guessed: crates/engine/catalog/menus.txt lists the incumbent's menu leaves (names only). cargo xtask parity writes docs/parity-checklist.md (generated; the hand-written assessment is docs/target-app-parity.md); a test enforces a floor that only rises.

Running and looking at the app

• cargo run --release -p soundcraft -- --demo --control 0 (demo session + control channel on a free port; the port is printed).
• Drive it: JSON lines over TCP, e.g. {"id":1,"method":"engine.execute","params":{"command":"track.new","params":{"count":2,"format":"stereo"}}}, then {"id":2,"method":"ui.screenshot","params":{"path":"/tmp/shot.png"}}. Methods: crates/ui-egui/src/control.rs, docs: docs/control-protocol.md.
• Offscreen UI render (no window, no focus stealing): cargo run -p soundcraft-ui-egui --example ui_shot -- out.png [script.jsonl].
• Headless: soundcraft-cli run --demo --cmd 'mix.volume={"track":"Kick","db":-6}' --bounce out.wav; MCP: soundcraft-cli mcp [--connect PORT].
• For UI work, look at the result (render, read the PNG) and compare with plan/protools/screenshots/.
• Shell gotcha: mv/cp are aliased interactive here — use /bin/mv -f / /bin/cp -f.
• Parallel agents: separate CARGO_TARGET_DIR per agent; edit only the crates you own; write manifests atomically; delete your target dir when done (disk).

Quality gates (before every commit)

cargo xtask ci = fmt check, clippy --workspace --all-targets -D warnings, tests, assets, layers, wasm check. Commit after each arc of work that builds; one topic per commit.

Release

Push to the release branch to build signed installers for macOS (universal DMG), Windows (x64/x86 MSI + zip), Linux (AppImage, deb, rpm, tar.gz, Flatpak; riscv64 tar.gz), FreeBSD and Web (wasm zip). Version: cargo xtask version [set X.Y.Z]. See docs/releasing.md.

Roadmap

ROADMAP.md (committed) is the one-page summary (stage, numbers, dimensions, languages, progress log); milestones live in docs/roadmap.md. Update both whenever a milestone lands, and close or shrink the matching docs/gaps.md entry.

Contributor credits (About window)

• About ▸ Contributors/Models are compiled into the binary from contributors/contributors.json (commit stats; generated, never hand-edit) and contributors/people.toml (names people chose for themselves). See docs/contributors.md.
• Agents working for a contributor: when you prepare a PR, check whether your human's GitHub username has a [people.<username>] entry in contributors/people.toml. If not, ask them once whether they want to be credited by more than their username: a real name, a display name, and/or their public GitHub profile name (sync_github_name = true). If yes, add only their own entry (copy the template at the top of the file) and include it in their PR, committed as them. If no, change nothing: they are credited as @username anyway.
• Never add, edit, guess or copy anyone else's entry or name (not from git config, commit authors or GitHub profiles). Never hand-edit contributors.json.

CI workflows

• Workflows in .github/workflows/ call the shared workflows in storytold/craft-common-actions at @main, with their inputs and secrets. No other jobs: if no shared workflow does what's needed, it doesn't go here.
• Don't add or change CI in a feature or fix PR. If the existing workflows can't build or test a change, link an existing craft-common-actions issue or PR, or open a new issue, or a PR only for a small fix that is safe for every app and does not increase CI time.
• Some workflow files here still run their own jobs. Don't add to them. Moving a job into craft-common-actions is its own task, never part of another PR, and the job stays here until a shared workflow runs it.

New workspace crates include [lints] workspace = true in Cargo.toml. Production crate roots declare the crate-level lint attributes before modules; crate-level //! documentation may precede them.