Island Lab · Tools · Internal

Herald

The brief builder. Name the project and the claim; Herald composes a click-through brief from the deck kit and holds it to the rules that keep a deck from turning back into a document.

The pipeline

  1. Template. Copies design/deck-template.html: hash routing, keyboard and swipe navigation, day and night themes, the contents overlay.
  2. Compose. Draws figures and components from the deck kit. Every figure is computed from the rule it illustrates; anything that cannot be derived from the claim stays out.
  3. Enforce. At most 10 slides and 50 words of rendered copy per slide, load-bearing claims carry a source pill, and design/wordcount.py has to exit clean before anything ships.
  4. Ship. Every change cuts a new versioned file, a stable alias points at the newest one, and the changelog records what moved and why.

Built from the kit

Parts

The deck kit renders every figure and component live: the layer stack, the tide and slack windows, the passage chart, the season bands, the stat tiles. What Herald assembles, the kit shows one piece at a time.

Reference

The Lorica brief is the reference implementation. When a rule reads as ambiguous, that deck is the answer.

Running it

Herald runs as the deck-builder agent in the platform repo. In a Claude Code session there, ask for a brief, a deck, or a figure in the Island Lab visual language; the agent reads design/README.md and the kit before it writes a line, and it will refuse to ship a deck that fails the word budget.

Island Lab · Herald hub