hyperframes/skills/hyperframes-cli/SKILL.md

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hyperframes-cli

HyperFrames CLI dev loop. Use when running npx hyperframes init, add, catalog, capture, lint, validate, inspect, layout, snapshot, compare, grade-compare, preview, play, render, publish, feedback, lambda, doctor, browser, info, upgrade, skills, compositions, docs, benchmark, telemetry, transcribe, tts, or remove-background, or when troubleshooting the HyperFrames build/render environment. Entry point for AWS Lambda cloud rendering (`hyperframes lambda deploy / render / progress / destroy / policies / sites`).

HyperFrames CLI

Everything runs through npx hyperframes unless project instructions specify a local wrapper. Obey the local wrapper exactly. Requires Node.js >= 22 and FFmpeg.

Workflow

1. Scaffold — npx hyperframes init my-video (or capture from a URL). init also checks the installed skills against the latest on GitHub and updates the global set if any are out of date. The --skip-skills flag is currently neutered (temporary, while the skills.sh registry catches up), so every init runs this check and pulls our latest skills regardless.
2. Write — author HTML composition (see the hyperframes-core skill)
3. Lint — npx hyperframes lint
4. Validate — npx hyperframes validate (runtime errors + contrast)
5. Visual inspect — npx hyperframes inspect
6. Preview / edit — npx hyperframes preview opens Studio, the timeline editor where the user can manually edit anything (not just watch). Review there, then ask before rendering.
7. Render — pick the variant:
   • Iterate: npx hyperframes render --quality draft
   • Deliver: npx hyperframes render --quality high --output out.mp4
   • CI / cross-host repro: npx hyperframes render --docker --strict --output out.mp4
   • Cloud (long / large): npx hyperframes lambda render ./my-project --width 1920 --height 1080 --wait (see Lambda below)
8. Report feedback — after verifying the output, npx hyperframes feedback --rating <1-5> --comment "..." once per task (see Agent Conventions).

Run lint, validate, and inspect before preview. lint catches missing data-composition-id, overlapping tracks, and unregistered timelines. validate loads the composition in headless Chrome and reports runtime console errors plus WCAG contrast issues. inspect seeks through the timeline and reports text spilling out of bubbles/containers or off the canvas — and, when a *.motion.json sidecar is present, verifies motion intent (entrances firing under seek, stagger order, in-frame, liveness) against that same seeked timeline.

For motion-heavy work, prefer snapshot-driven iteration and a *.motion.json sidecar — see references/lint-validate-inspect.md for the discipline and motion-verification spec. To compare agent-authored candidate variants, use npx hyperframes compare <path...> [--at <sec>] [--labels a,b,c] [--out compare.png] [--cols n] [--json] to render each composition through its own runtime, assemble one labeled sheet, inspect it side by side, and choose. For color-grade selection, use the color-specific sibling npx hyperframes grade-compare --for <frame> --grades grades.json (or --luts a.cube,b.cube) to render every grading candidate through the real WebGL grading runtime into one labeled PNG before choosing the winner.

Agent Conventions

Cross-cutting rules that hold for every command:

• --json is available on every command except render, preview, and play server modes. Use it for any agent / CI invocation of the supported commands; output includes a _meta envelope (cli version, latest available, update advice). render reports status via stdout + exit code only — verify success with the post-render check below. preview --selection --json and preview --context --json are the preview exceptions: they do not start a server, they query the user's running Studio session and exit.
• doctor --json always exits 0, even when the environment is broken. Gate on the payload's ok field: npx hyperframes doctor --json | jq -e '.ok' > /dev/null. This insulates pipelines from CLI release churn.
• Non-TTY mode is auto-detected. When stdout is not a TTY (CI, agents, piped output) the CLI auto-switches to non-interactive; init then requires --example. Pass --non-interactive to force this mode even on a TTY.
• CI gating on render: --strict fails on lint errors, --strict-all fails on warnings too, --strict-variables fails on undeclared --variables keys.
• Paths in --json are redacted — $HOME becomes the literal $HOME so output is safe to paste into bug reports and agent contexts.
• Render is user-gated. Never auto-render once the checks pass. Pause at preview, tell the user the video is editable in Studio, and render only after they approve.
• Use Studio context for user-directed edits. When the user says "this selected element", "the thing I clicked", "current selection", or similar, ask them to select it in Studio, then run npx hyperframes preview --context --json --context-fields selection. Use the returned selection.target.hfId / selector, selection.sourceFile, selection.currentTime, and selection.thumbnailUrl to anchor the edit. If selection is null and errors.selection.code is no-selection, ask the user to click the element and rerun; do not guess from screenshots.
• Keep Studio context compact. preview --context --json returns compact selection by default. Add --context-fields selection, --context-fields selection,lint, or --context-fields lint to avoid bloating agent context. Use --context-detail full only when you need heavy fields like computed styles, inline styles, or text-field metadata.
• Post-render verification. After render returns exit 0, confirm the output file exists and has plausible size before reporting success: [ -s "$OUTPUT" ] || echo "render produced no output". The CLI prints ◇ <path> on success; for long renders also sanity-check duration with ffprobe -i "$OUTPUT" -show_format -v error.
• Report feedback after a successful render. Once the output is verified, run npx hyperframes feedback --rating <1-5> --comment "..." once per task to report how the run went — 5 clean, lower when you hit friction. Put any bug, workaround, missing feature, or confusing behaviour you encountered in --comment (include the failing composition pattern and what you tried). This is the project's primary signal channel; renders that go silent leave the maintainers blind. Skip only when telemetry is disabled or the user opted out.

Routing

Want to…	Read
Scaffold a project (init, capture, skills)	references/init-and-scaffold.md
Check correctness (lint, validate, inspect, snapshot)	references/lint-validate-inspect.md
Preview or render (preview, play, render, publish)	references/preview-render.md
Diagnose the environment (doctor, browser)	references/doctor-browser.md
Cloud render on AWS Lambda (lambda deploy / sites / render / progress / destroy / policies)	references/lambda.md
Everything else (info, upgrade, compositions, docs, benchmark, telemetry, asset preprocessing)	references/upgrade-info-misc.md

Cross-Skill Hand-Offs

• Tailwind projects (init --tailwind) → use hyperframes-core (Tailwind reference) before editing classes or theme tokens.
• Registry blocks/components (hyperframes add, hyperframes catalog) → use hyperframes-registry for install paths, sub-composition wiring, and snippet merging.
• Asset preprocessing (tts, transcribe, remove-background) → use media-use for voice selection, Whisper model rules, captions, and TTS-to-captions chain.
• Parametrized renders (--variables) → declared via data-composition-variables on <html>; see hyperframes-core for the full schema.

Lambda (Cloud Rendering)

hyperframes lambda deploys distributed rendering to AWS Lambda and drives renders from your laptop or CI. End-to-end is three commands:

npx hyperframes lambda deploy                                             # provision SAM stack (Lambda + Step Functions + S3)
npx hyperframes lambda render ./my-project --width 1920 --height 1080 --wait
npx hyperframes lambda destroy                                            # tear down (S3 bucket is retained)

Use Lambda when a render is too long / too large for one host (multi-minute videos, 4K, large parallel batches) and you have AWS credentials configured. For dev-loop iteration stay on local render.

See references/lambda.md for prerequisites, all 6 subcommands (deploy, sites create, render, progress, destroy, policies), IAM policy validation, state files, and cost / cleanup rules.

Minimum Completion Gate

Static gates

npx hyperframes lint
npx hyperframes validate

Add inspect for layout-sensitive work and render --strict in CI to fail on lint errors.

Visual smoke test — required when the project uses sub-compositions

lint / validate / inspect evaluate each composition in isolation. They never load index.html and mount sub-compositions via data-composition-src, so they cannot catch cross-file mount failures (see hyperframes-core → references/sub-compositions.md, "Common pitfalls"). The only gate that catches them is one that actually loads index.html and seeks the timeline.

Use hyperframes snapshot — it loads the project the same way render does (so it exercises the same mount path) but only captures the timestamps you request, so it's seconds instead of a full render:

# Capture one frame at the midpoint of every sub-composition.
# Midpoints = data-start + data-duration/2 for each host slot in index.html.
npx hyperframes snapshot --at <t1>,<t2>,<t3>,...

# Or, if you don't need per-scene targeting, an evenly-spaced sample:
npx hyperframes snapshot --frames 9

Output lands in snapshots/frame-NN-at-Xs.png. Eyeball each frame against the scene plan.

Per-frame red flags (each maps to a specific failure mode the static gates miss):

What you see	Root cause
Text shows up tiny + unstyled in the top-left corner	<style> block left in <head> outside <template> (Pitfall 1) — no CSS reached live DOM
SVG/icon elements blown up to canvas-size	Same as above — no width/height constraints applied
Hero element of the scene is missing entirely; only background + watermark visible	Host-id ≠ template id (Pitfall 2) — timeline never ran, frame captured at initial state
Snapshot command logs Sub-composition timelines not registered after 45000ms	Pitfall 2 — direct confirmation

snapshots/ can be deleted after eyeballing; the user-facing final render is a separate pass with npx hyperframes render.