| name | extract |
| description | Crawl an existing website (capped, multi-page) and seed stardust/current/ with PRODUCT.md, DESIGN.md, DESIGN.json, a per-page inventory, and the consolidated brand surface — the captured design system, palette, typography, motifs, and voice of the live site. Use when the user wants to analyze an existing site's design, extract or reverse-engineer its design system or brand, capture design tokens from a live site, import a website as the starting point for a redesign, capture the current state before a migration, or invokes /stardust:extract. Trigger phrases include "analyze this site", "extract the design tokens", "capture the brand", "crawl the site", "reverse engineer the design". Not for scraping page data or content for its own sake (it captures design evidence, not datasets), and not for the redesign itself — extraction is descriptive; direction and prototyping happen downstream. |
| license | Apache-2.0 |
stardust:extract
Crawl an existing website, parse each page, extract the brand surface,
and produce a stardust-formatted snapshot of the current state under
stardust/current/. The output describes what the site is; later
sub-commands consume it to decide what it should be.
This skill is descriptive: it does not invent direction, it does not
critique, and it does not modify the live site. It writes only under
stardust/current/ and updates stardust/state.json.
Inputs
<url> — required. The origin to crawl. Examples: https://example.com,
https://example.com/shop. A path narrows the same-origin crawl to
that subtree.
--cap <N> — optional. Override the default 5-page cap. The cap
is intentionally small — a 5-page sample (home + four IA
pillars/templates) is enough for cross-page brand aggregation,
system-component detection, and the brand-review HTML; lift it
(e.g. --cap 25) when a deeper crawl is genuinely needed.
--all — optional. Lift the cap entirely; extract every
discovered page after junk filtering. Equivalent to --cap 0.
Use when the user spontaneously asks for a full crawl.
--pages <slug,slug,...> — optional. Restrict the crawl to specific
paths (slugs derived per reference/ia-extraction.md). Bypasses
the cap.
--refresh <slug> — optional. Re-extract one page that already exists
in state.json.
--single — optional. Equivalent to --cap 1. Useful for testing.
--wait <fast|medium|spec|auto> — optional. Wait strategy per page.
Default medium. See reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes.
--no-junk-filter — optional. Disable the default junk-page filter
in discovery (see reference/ia-extraction.md § Filtering).
--no-consent-dismiss — optional. Skip the pre-flight consent /
cookie banner dismissal (see reference/playwright-recipe.md
§ Pre-flight: consent dismissal). Use when the redesign scope
includes the consent surface or the dismissal's side-effects
(script activation that wouldn't otherwise run) must be
avoided. Default is to dismiss, keeping screenshots, voice
aggregation, and per-section style unpolluted by the banner.
--concurrency <n> — optional. Parallel browser contexts for the
per-page capture loop. Default 4; sane range 4–8. See
§ Concurrency.
--brand-source <url> — optional, repeatable. An additional
same-brand origin whose brand surface enriches the primary
extraction (shallow capture: home + up to 2 nav-linked pages).
See § Cross-site brand sources.
--design-source <url> — optional. Design-donor origin: its
design system is captured to stardust/canon-source/ and becomes
the fixed redesign target while the primary origin supplies
content. See § Cross-site brand sources.
--prep — optional. Run in migrate-prep mode: lift the cap,
type each page, detect module candidates, capture typed content
slots, emit the prep summary. See § Prep mode below. Typically
invoked via the prepare-migration orchestrator skill rather
than directly.
Setup
Run the master skill's setup procedure first
(skills/stardust/SKILL.md § Setup): impeccable dep check, context
loader, state read.
Additional checks for this sub-command:
-
Playwright availability. The extraction step needs a real
browser. Detect Playwright in this order: a Playwright MCP server,
then a project-importable playwright module. The npx playwright probe is NOT sufficient — it confirms the CLI
(which resolves a global install) but the recipe and
scripts/crawl.mjs do import { chromium } from 'playwright',
and ESM module resolution does not honour a global install or
NODE_PATH — the import throws ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND even where
npx playwright --version succeeds. Verify the module is
import-resolvable from the project root (probe:
node -e "import('playwright').then(()=>process.exit(0))"); if it
isn't, run npm i -D playwright --no-save --legacy-peer-deps (or
use the Playwright MCP server) before crawling. The
--legacy-peer-deps flag is required on aem-boilerplate targets
(their pinned eslint@8 makes a plain npm i exit ERESOLVE
before playwright is even considered). Don't trust the CLI
probe alone.
--no-save installs are ephemeral. Any later real npm i (e.g. a setup step
adding a devDependency) prunes non-manifest packages, silently
removing playwright mid-pipeline. Every downstream skill that
renders (prototype, migrate, deploy, diff) must re-run the
import-resolvability probe — and re-install on failure — at the
start of its own run, not assume extract's install survived.
Script location matters. ESM resolves import 'playwright'
from the script's directory, and the plugin tree ships no
node_modules — so running crawl.mjs from the plugin path
throws ERR_MODULE_NOT_FOUND even when the project has playwright
installed. Copy the script byte-identical into the project
(stardust/scripts/crawl.mjs) and run the copy; it resolves
against the project's node_modules.
Bundled crawler. skills/extract/scripts/crawl.mjs is a
runnable reference implementation of this whole sub-command —
browser config + bot-management fallback, consent dismissal, wait
- scroll, the capture list, per-page full-page screenshots
(
assets/screenshots/<slug>.png, consumed by the Phase 2.5
vision gate), response validation, and the §
Capture-hygiene hardening (visibility filter, interstitial drop,
SPA-shell flag, modal textContent capture, tracking-pixel
discounting, cross-page duplicate detection). Prefer invoking it
(node skills/extract/scripts/crawl.mjs --url <origin> [--pages …] [--max N] [--concurrency N]) over hand-rolling a Playwright
script per run; extend
its in-page capture() to cover any recipe field it doesn't yet
emit.
-
Origin collision. If stardust/state.json already records
site.originUrl and the new <url> is a different origin, stop and
ask before clobbering. Stardust does not silently mix two sites in
one project.
-
Browser contexts. Open a fresh BrowserContext per capture
worker (§ Concurrency; default 4). Run the consent dismissal
pre-flight per reference/playwright-recipe.md § Pre-flight:
consent dismissal unless --no-consent-dismiss is set.
Cookies persist within a context but not across contexts —
re-establish consent state per context (re-run the dismissal on
the worker's first page, or clone the probe context's
storageState). Record the resolved method in
_crawl-log.json#consent.method.
-
Bot-management probe. When the first navigation in the run
returns ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR or ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR,
or hangs through the entire hard-cap on what should be a fast
origin, do not retry headless — switch to headed Chrome per
§ Failure modes → Bot-management block and record the switch in
_crawl-log.json#discovery.fetchTechnique so re-runs start in
headed mode without rediscovering the issue.
Procedure
Phase 1 — Discovery
Discover the page inventory before crawling. Procedure in
reference/ia-extraction.md. In summary:
-
Fetch <origin>/sitemap.xml, then <origin>/sitemap_index.xml,
then check robots.txt for Sitemap: directives.
-
If no sitemap is reachable, run a same-origin BFS crawl from
<url>, depth-limited to 3, link-extracting from rendered HTML.
-
Filter the discovered URL list: same origin only, exclude
mailto:, tel:, anchor-only links, query-only variations,
common asset paths (.css, .js, .pdf, image extensions).
-
De-duplicate trailing-slash variations.
-
Apply the junk-page filter (reference/ia-extraction.md §
Junk-page filter) unless --no-junk-filter is set. Surface the
filtered list to the user as overridable.
-
Apply the cap (default 5, or --cap, or --all for no cap)
and proceed silently. Print an informational summary of
what was kept and what was cut — but do not gate on user
confirmation. Users who want different scope set it
spontaneously at command time:
$stardust extract https://example.com # default 5 pages
$stardust extract https://example.com --cap 25 # bump to 25
$stardust extract https://example.com --all # lift the cap
$stardust extract https://example.com --pages home,about,pricing
$stardust extract https://example.com --single # just the entry URL
The agent reads spontaneous scope intent from the user's prompt
(e.g. "extract all pages", "look at just the home and pricing",
"do a full crawl") and applies the equivalent flag. No
re-confirmation needed once intent is clear.
Informational output (not a prompt — proceed immediately):
Discovered 38 pages on https://example.com (sitemap.xml).
Filtered as likely junk (5): /test/, /sample-page/, /holiday1/, ...
Selecting 5 highest-priority pages:
- / (home)
- /about
- /pricing
- /products
- /contact
Cut (28 pages, --all to lift): /blog/post-1, /blog/post-2, ...
Extracting...
Selection heuristic: page-type checklist first, then score-based
ranking (home + IA-pillar keywords + sitemap priority − archive /
version markers). See reference/ia-extraction.md § Page
selection and § Priority for the cap. The English-only keyword
list is a known limitation for localized sites.
-
Write the discovered list to stardust/current/_crawl-log.json
(created if absent) with _provenance and the full discovery
reasoning, including filteredAsJunk[] and userChoice. This is
an audit trail, not a state file.
Phase 2 — Per-page extraction
For each page in the cap-respecting list, render with Playwright
following reference/playwright-recipe.md. Captures run
concurrently per § Concurrency. The recipe is
mandatory per page — in particular, do not skip the wait, scroll, or
capture-list steps:
- Viewport 1440 × 900 @ 2× DPR
- Wait per the configured wait mode (default
medium; see § Wait
modes in reference/playwright-recipe.md)
- Disable animations via
prefers-reduced-motion: reduce
- After the wait resolves, scroll to bottom in 4 viewport-height
steps with 300 ms pauses, then return to top — this is required
to trigger lazy-load and IntersectionObserver-driven content
- Record
waitMs and waitMode in the per-page _provenance
Capture per page (full schema in reference/current-state-schema.md):
- Page metadata (title, meta description, OG tags, theme-color)
- Semantic structure: heading outline, landmark roles, sections
- Hero headline + lede (resolved) —
heroHeadline / heroLede
picked by font-size × hero-region with a junk/hidden-state filter and
a clean meta-description fallback (per reference/playwright-recipe.md
§ Capture list 5-bis). Required for JS-rendered sites whose
document-order headings surface modal / promo / count junk
instead of the real tagline.
- Content: visible text per section (full innerText, no
truncation per
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Capture
list 7), structured paragraphs (body[]), lists, FAQ Q/A
pairs, and review/testimonial quotes per
§ Capture list 7-bis. Without these structured fields,
every body region under a heading falls back to placeholder
signature at migrate time.
- CTA labels and href targets, link inventory (internal vs external)
- Per-section computed style summary: dominant colors, font families
in use, spacing rhythm, border-radius, shadows
- Media inventory: img with
currentSrc/srcset captured with
query strings intact plus a resolves flag (HEAD/GET with browser
UA + Referer), intrinsic dimensions, inline SVG count, video/iframe
presence, cssBackgrounds[] (including pseudo-element ::before/
::after walks per § Capture list 11) so background-image
heroes and motifs do not silently disappear and 404ing CDN
images are flagged before migrate ships about:error.
- Font files captured via network-intercept (per § Capture list
16): every
woff2/woff/ttf/otf response saved under
assets/fonts/ and recorded in _brand-extraction.json#type.files[]
with licensing flag.
- Icon-font detection (per § Capture list 17): when the page
uses
[class^="icon-"] with non-default ::before
font-family + codepoint, capture the family, save the file,
and record the iconClass → codepoint table in
_brand-extraction.json#iconFont.
- Interactive elements: forms (with field types), buttons, modals
detected by ARIA roles
- Full-page screenshot to
assets/screenshots/<slug>.png —
script-captured by the bundled crawler after the wait/scroll
settle (viewport-only fallback on extremely tall pages; mode in
_signals.screenshotMode, relative path in the page JSON
screenshot field)
Save to stardust/current/pages/<slug>.json with _provenance as the
first key. Save referenced media to stardust/current/assets/media/
preserving basename plus a short content hash.
Live-render evidence (synthesis is forbidden). Refuse to mark
a page extracted in state.json unless its _provenance
contains renderedBy: "playwright", an ISO-8601 fetchedAt, a
positive integer waitMs, a waitMode from the recipe, and a
final httpStatus in the 2xx/3xx range. These five fields are
the contract enforced by reference/current-state-schema.md
§ Live-render evidence and read back by every downstream phase
via validateProvenance() per
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md § Provenance
validation. Synthesizing a page record from
_brand-extraction.json plus URL patterns plus captured photos
— the 2026-04-30 lovesac shortcut — is the failure mode this
guard exists to prevent. When the agent (or a delegated sub-
agent) cannot satisfy the contract for a page, treat the page
as a Phase 2 failure: record under _crawl-log.json#crawl.failures[]
with errorClass: "ProvenanceMissing" and continue.
Mark the page extracted in state.json immediately after each
successful page write. If a page fails, record the error in
_crawl-log.json and continue — extraction is best-effort per page.
Phase 2.5 — Vision verification
Before anything downstream is authored, look at each captured
page's screenshot (assets/screenshots/<slug>.png) — the multimodal
model reads the image — and verify it against the extracted record:
- Does the recorded hero (headline + asset) match what the pixels show?
- Is the extracted palette plausible against the pixels?
- Does a
cssBackgrounds: [] record look believable, or is imagery
visibly present — a silent capture failure?
- Is the logo captured?
- Is the page actually rendered — not a consent wall, bot-block
page, or blank SPA shell?
On mismatch, re-run that page's capture with the escalation ladder
before proceeding: bump the wait mode one step
(reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes), then headed Chrome
(§ Bot-management fallback), then a fresh browser context. Record
the outcome per page in _crawl-log.json#visionCheck[]:
{ "slug": "pricing", "verdict": "recaptured", "notes": "record said zero CSS backgrounds; screenshot shows a full-bleed photo hero" }
verdict is "ok" | "recaptured" | "suspect" — suspect means the
mismatch survived the ladder; downstream phases treat that record as
unreliable. Vision is the authoritative capture check; the
heuristic defenses (low-media flag, spaShellSuspect, duplicate
hash) remain as cheap early signals but no longer gate alone.
Phase 3 — Brand-surface extraction
Run after the capture phases (2–2.5). Aggregation may proceed
incrementally as concurrent page captures complete (§ Concurrency),
but the written file must reflect every extracted page — including
brand-source pages per § Cross-site brand sources.
Produces stardust/current/_brand-extraction.json
per reference/brand-surface.md. Some fields are home-only (logo,
voice samples, register heuristic); the visual tokens that drive
DESIGN.md (palette, radius, shadow, type) are aggregated across all
extracted pages to avoid the home-page bias documented in
brand-surface.md § Aggregation scope. Captures:
- Logo by the v1 priority chain: inline SVG →
<img> with
logo-ish class/id → apple-touch-icon → og:image → favicon →
synthesized placeholder. Save to stardust/current/assets/logo.<ext>.
- Favicon — ALWAYS captured as its own asset (independent of the
logo chain) to
stardust/current/assets/favicon.<ext>, per
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Favicon capture. Downstream,
prototype embeds it in the proposed page head and deploy ships
it to the Edge Delivery site.
- Palette — aggregate computed colors across all extracted
pages (background, text, accents, borders, hovers). Frequency-sort,
cluster near-duplicates, emit a role-named list (background, surface,
text, primary, secondary, accent).
- Type — font families in use with their weights, sizes, and
computed line-heights. Identify the heading family vs body family.
Run the modular-scale audit (
brand-surface.md § Modular-scale
audit) and emit scaleAudit.kind = "modular" | "ad-hoc".
- Motifs — signature border-radius (cross-page mode of non-zero
values, weighted by element count), shadow stack (top 3 distinct,
cross-page), gradient inventory, common patterns (chip, badge,
card, hero-with-image). When the home-only mode disagrees with the
cross-page mode, surface the divergence in
_provenance.notes.
- Voice samples — first paragraph of body copy, the hero headline,
3 representative CTA labels, a representative link list. Used by
direct later but extracted now so the network round-trip is over.
- Hero image — elevate the home page's primary visual
asset to
voice.heroImage (per reference/brand-surface.md
§ heroImage resolution), so downstream prototype picks the
live hero rather than the og:image from the raw media list.
- Hero medium (signature) — when the hero/first viewport carries a
moving asset (background
<video> / HLS / canvas / WebGL /
Lottie / animated SVG / scroll-driven motion), elevate it to
voice.heroMedium (per reference/brand-surface.md § heroMedium
resolution). This is the page's signature; without elevation
downstream prototype flattens it to a static hero. A non-null
heroMedium triggers signature
preservation (skills/stardust/reference/intent-dimensions.md
§ 8b) at prototype time.
- Icon font — when detected per
reference/playwright-recipe.md
§ Capture list 17, populate _brand-extraction.json#iconFont
with family, file path, and the iconClass → codepoint
table so prototypes can render the brand's actual icons.
- System components — cross-page repeated DOM blocks (site
header, site footer, cross-promo strips, persistent CTAs,
breadcrumbs). Detected by heading-sequence + CTA-label fingerprint
per
reference/brand-surface.md § System components. Required —
these are usually the most load-bearing surfaces and must not
silently disappear from the redesign target.
- Origins — one entry per contributing origin in
_brand-extraction.json#origins[] per reference/brand-surface.md
§ Origins. Single-origin runs emit a one-entry array; brand-source
runs attribute widened evidence per origin.
Do not invent values. Every captured value cites a source selector or
URL in _brand-extraction.json for traceability.
Phase 4 — Seed stardust/current/PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md
The current-state PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md are descriptive, not
authored — there is no interview to run because the user is not
defining intent here, the agent is describing the existing site. Write
them directly using impeccable's format specs:
- For PRODUCT.md, follow the section structure in impeccable's
reference/teach.md. Populate Register from the brand surface
(sites that read as marketing/landing → brand; tools/dashboards →
product; ambiguous → brand with a note). Populate Users,
Product Purpose, Brand Personality, Anti-references, and
Design Principles from the captured copy and the brand surface.
Where the agent must infer, mark the section with _provenance: inferred and a one-line basis sentence.
- For DESIGN.md and DESIGN.json, follow the format spec in
impeccable's
reference/document.md. Populate frontmatter
(colors, typography, rounded, spacing, components) from
the captured tokens. The extensions block of DESIGN.json carries
v1's componentStyle, motifs, and voice arrays so nothing is
lost.
Stardust does not invoke $impeccable teach or $impeccable document for the current-state files: those commands write to project
root (the target) and run an interview. Stardust authors the
descriptive snapshot directly. The format spec from impeccable is the
contract; the runtime command is not.
The target-state PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md at the project root are
written by $stardust direct in Phase 2 of the pipeline, not here.
Phase 5 — Render stardust/current/brand-review.html
After Phase 4 writes the descriptive PRODUCT.md and DESIGN.md, emit
the current-state brand review per
reference/brand-review-template.md.
The brand-review HTML is the first surface a human can eyeball to
verify the extraction before committing to a redesign direction —
misreads that are invisible in JSON (a wrong dominant radius, a
missing system component, a single-page palette bias) are obvious to
the eye while they are still cheap to fix (re-extract is fast;
re-direct + re-prototype is not).
The template is mandatory. In particular:
- Run the Tensions detectors listed in
reference/brand-review-template.md § Detectors. Each rule is
mechanical; emit a tension card whenever the trigger condition
matches. The review may ship with zero tensions if the data is
too thin to evaluate, but the detectors must always be run.
- Render in the brand's own captured colors and fonts, not a
stardust shell.
- Embed all CSS; do not load external JavaScript or fonts unless
the live site already does.
- Cite the source artifact for every section (e.g.
_brand-extraction.json § type under Typography).
If the data for a section is missing, omit the section — do not
fabricate placeholders. The coverage callout at the top reflects what
is missing.
Phase 6 — Update state and report
After all Phase 2-5 writes succeed:
-
Update stardust/state.json (schema in
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md):
site.originUrl, site.extractedAt, site.pageCap,
site.totalDiscovered, site.crawled
pages[] — one entry per crawled page with status: "extracted",
filled currentStatePath, empty prototypePath and migratedPath
designSource — only when --design-source was used:
{ url, capturedAt, path } per § Cross-site brand sources
-
Print a one-screen summary:
Extracted https://example.com (5/38 pages, sitemap.xml)
stardust/current/
PRODUCT.md, DESIGN.md, DESIGN.json, brand-review.html,
pages/ (5), assets/logo.svg, _brand-extraction.json, _crawl-log.json
Per-page evidence:
slug live waitMode waitMs status media(img/bg)
/ yes medium 2380 200 38/6
/pricing yes medium 1940 200 9/0 ⚠ low-media
/contact yes domcontentloaded(fb) 8000 200 3/0
...
Wait summary: 4 resolved at medium (avg 2.4s), 1 fallback (timed out at 8s)
→ /contact may be under-captured; consider --refresh
Media summary: 1 page flagged low-media (/pricing) — see media-coverage check
Vision check: 4 ok, 1 recaptured (/pricing) — _crawl-log.json#visionCheck
Open stardust/current/brand-review.html to verify the extraction
before running $stardust direct.
Coverage note: extracted 5 of 38 discovered pages; 5 pages
covering distinct templates is usually sufficient for the
cross-page brand surface. Widen with --cap <N> or --pages.
Next: $stardust direct (resolve a redesign direction)
The per-page evidence table is mandatory. The live column
is yes when _provenance.renderedBy === "playwright" AND
waitMs > 0, else no. A no row means the page record was
not produced by a live Playwright render — the visible column
is the defense-in-depth signal for the failure mode the
write-time guard exists to prevent (2026-04-30 lovesac). A
maintainer scanning the summary should see yes on every row.
Compute the wait summary by grouping each page's _provenance.waitMode
and averaging waitMs. List slugs whose waitMode ends in
(fallback) (rendered as (fb) in the table for width) as
candidates for --refresh.
The media(img/bg) column is the analogous defense-in-depth
signal for imagery. It prints <count of media.imgs> / <count of media.cssBackgrounds>. Flag a row ⚠ low-media when the page
reads as brand/marketing (register brand, or a landing/solution/
product template) yet has cssBackgrounds: [] and few large
rasters (no media.imgs entry with intrinsic width ≥ 600). That
combination is the signature of a silently-failed background /
lazy-media walk — a capture pass that specs the full background
walk (playwright-recipe.md § Capture list 11) yet silently
produces nothing still ships an image-less capture (2026-06-26
knack.com: cssBackgrounds: [] on every page, all product
imagery lost). A flagged row is the cue to re-run that page with
--refresh (and, if it persists, to fall back to headed Chrome per
§ Bot-management fallback). A maintainer scanning the summary should
treat a brand-register site with all-zero bg counts as suspect,
not as "this site uses no background images."
Cross-site brand sources
Two flags widen extraction beyond the primary origin — read
reference/cross-site-sources.md in full whenever either flag is
present. Both are opt-in; without them this section is inert.
Core contract (merge rules and capture shapes in the reference):
--brand-source <url> (repeatable) — a same-brand sibling
gets a shallow capture (home + ≤2 nav-linked pages, full recipe +
provenance) under stardust/current/brand-sources/<host>/.
Evidence, not inventory: never enters state.json.pages[].
Its palette/type/motif/voice evidence aggregates into
_brand-extraction.json with per-origin attribution
(origins[]); conflicts resolve toward the primary; widened
traits are attributed, never invented. Excluded from system
components, voiceTable, and cross-promo detection.
--design-source <url> — a design donor is captured to
stardust/canon-source/ (same shapes as current/, default cap),
its descriptive DESIGN.md/json derived per Phase 4 rules, and
state.json.designSource = { url, capturedAt, path: "stardust/canon-source/" } stamped. direct pins the donor
system as the target (its § Mode A); donor evidence never
aggregates into the primary _brand-extraction.json.
Sibling-site discovery
After the primary crawl (Phases 2–2.5), harvest candidate same-brand
origins from evidence already captured — no extra navigation:
- footer / nav links out to other properties
- "our brands" / "our companies" pages
hreflang alternates on other domains
- subdomain families (
shop., careers., country subdomains)
og:site_name matches across captured pages
List candidates with confidence + the evidence line in the crawl
report and in _crawl-log.json#siblingCandidates[]:
{ "origin": "https://example.co.uk", "confidence": "high", "evidence": "hreflang alternate on 4/5 pages", "decision": "included" }
- Interactive: propose — "found 3 candidate sibling properties —
include as
--brand-source?" — and proceed on the answer.
- Hands-off (
state.json.handsOff is true): auto-include up to
2 high-confidence candidates as brand-sources; record the
decision in siblingCandidates[].decision.
Discovery is capped and cheap: harvesting reads captured evidence
only, and each included sibling gets the shallow brand-source
capture (≤ 3 pages). It must never balloon the crawl.
Outputs
| Path | Purpose |
|---|
stardust/current/PRODUCT.md | Descriptive strategy of the existing site (impeccable format) |
stardust/current/DESIGN.md | Descriptive visual system (Stitch format) |
stardust/current/DESIGN.json | Sidecar with extensions for motifs, voice, components |
stardust/current/brand-review.html | Self-contained visual review of the extraction (first eyeball-able artifact) |
stardust/current/pages/<slug>.json | Per-page parsed structure + content |
stardust/current/assets/logo.<ext> | Extracted logo |
stardust/current/assets/favicon.<ext> | Site favicon (first-class asset; prototype head + deploy consume it) |
stardust/current/assets/media/ | Extracted media referenced by pages |
stardust/current/assets/screenshots/ | Per-page full-page screenshots, script-captured by crawl.mjs (Phase 2.5 vision gate + brand-review) |
stardust/current/_brand-extraction.json | Consolidated brand surface (palette, type, motifs, voice, system components) |
stardust/current/_crawl-log.json | Discovery + crawl audit trail (incl. visionCheck[], siblingCandidates[]) |
stardust/current/brand-sources/<host>/ | Shallow same-brand captures (only with --brand-source) |
stardust/canon-source/ | Design-donor capture + descriptive DESIGN.md/json (only with --design-source) |
stardust/state.json | Updated with site + per-page status (+ designSource stamp) |
Concurrency
Page captures run concurrently: the Phase 2 queue is drained by
4–8 parallel browser contexts (--concurrency, default 4). Each
worker owns its BrowserContext; consent state is re-established per
context (Setup step 3). Media resolves / HEAD checks are batched
with Promise.all. Brand-surface aggregation (Phase 3) may proceed
incrementally as pages complete, so long as the written
_brand-extraction.json reflects every extracted page. The bundled
crawler implements the pool (crawl.mjs --concurrency <n>).
Across processes, per state-machine.md: stardust does not lock. Two
concurrent extracts on the same project are last-write-wins. Document
this in the user report; do not engineer around it.
Failure modes
- Network failure mid-crawl. Continue, record in
_crawl-log.json,
end with a partial state. State.json reflects only successfully
extracted pages. User can re-run; already-extracted pages are
skipped unless --refresh <slug>.
- HTTP 4xx/5xx, non-HTML content, soft-404s. Validated explicitly
per
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Response validation. Each
produces a distinct error class (HTTPError, ContentTypeError,
EmptyPageError) recorded in _crawl-log.json#crawl.failures[].
Failed pages do not appear in state.json as extracted —
they appear only in the failure log. Without this validation a 5xx
page silently lands as an empty success and propagates wrong data
to direct and prototype.
- Login wall. Do not attempt to authenticate. If the home page
redirects to a login screen, capture that one page, mark the rest as
unreachable, and ask the user how to proceed (provide cookies via
Playwright config, change the entry URL, or scope to public pages).
- Bot-management block (Akamai / Cloudflare / F5 / Imperva).
When the first navigation returns
ERR_HTTP2_PROTOCOL_ERROR,
ERR_QUIC_PROTOCOL_ERROR, or hangs through the hard-cap on a
TLS/H2 fingerprint check, the issue is JA3/H2 fingerprinting on
bundled-chromium-default headless mode — not auth, not network.
Switch to headless: false, channel: 'chrome' per
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Bot-management fallback. Do
not retry headless: it will fail identically. The headed
fallback works against most enterprise / commerce origins;
playwright-extra + stealth plugin is a non-standard escape
hatch for the residual cases. The headed window pops visibly,
which is acceptable for interactive runs and unacceptable for
unattended pipelines — surface this to the user when first
triggered.
- JavaScript-only content. Playwright already handles this. If
the configured wait condition never fires within the mode's hard
cap (
reference/playwright-recipe.md § Wait modes), fall back to
domcontentloaded and capture what is rendered. Record the
fallback in the per-page _provenance.waitMode and surface in the
wait-summary line of the final report.
- Synthesis attempt (forbidden). When the agent (or a delegated
sub-agent) cannot run a real Playwright render for a page —
whether due to time pressure, token budget, or a tool/network
failure — the only correct outcome is to record the page as a
Phase 2 failure (
errorClass: "ProvenanceMissing" in
_crawl-log.json#crawl.failures[]) and continue. Synthesizing
a page record from _brand-extraction.json plus URL patterns
plus captured photos at "semantically matching" template
positions is forbidden. The shortcut produces output
indistinguishable from a successful run and propagates
fabricated content through every downstream phase
(2026-04-30 lovesac.com: 20 of 25 pages synthesized, caught
four phases later).
Prep mode (--prep)
When invoked with --prep, extract runs an extended pass that
prepares the inventory for migration — read
reference/prep-mode.md in full before running any --prep
extraction. Discovery-mode runs (without --prep) are unchanged:
small cap, no typing, no module detection. The flag is intended for
the prepare-migration orchestrator, though direct invocation is
supported.
Core contract (procedure, formats, and detection rules in the
reference):
--prep implies --all — migration coverage requires the full
junk-filtered inventory, not the discovery cap.
- Page types (
landing | article | listing | program | form | static | unique) are LLM-inferred into state.json.pages[].type
(discovery-mode runs leave type null); the user confirms in
direct --prep.
- Module candidates (cross-page structural repeats, detected by the
signal-source priority in the reference) are drafted under
DESIGN.json.extensions.modules[] with status: "candidate";
per-page JSON gains a typed slots section per page-type.
- The prep summary replaces the Phase 6 report; its
Provenance: <live>/<total> live line is mandatory, and any
ratio short of <total>/<total> means the run failed the
synthesis guard and is incomplete.
- When delegating extraction to a sub-agent, the sub-agent prompt
must forbid synthesis by name and require the per-page
evidence table and wait-summary line in its return
(
reference/prep-mode.md § Sub-agent prompt requirements);
missing any of the three is a recipe violation.
References
reference/playwright-recipe.md — viewport, capture list, logo locator chain.
reference/ia-extraction.md — sitemap + BFS crawl + cap procedure.
reference/current-state-schema.md — per-page JSON schema.
reference/brand-surface.md — consolidated brand-surface schema.
reference/brand-review-template.md — current-state brand-review HTML contract + Tensions detectors.
reference/prep-mode.md — full --prep procedure (typing, module candidates, typed slots, prep summary, sub-agent requirements).
reference/cross-site-sources.md — full --brand-source / --design-source procedure (shallow capture, merge rules, canon-source donor).
skills/stardust/reference/state-machine.md — state.json contract.
skills/stardust/reference/artifact-map.md — provenance shape.