prime-silo-experience

name

prime-silo-experience

description

The Prime-Silo product experience contract — identity (Prime-Silo + Agent Benny, never Space Agent), earth-tone design tokens, progressive-discovery doctrine, and the "motion is meaning" choreography rules that bring animejs.com-grade kinetics INTO the app without violating the C0 calm contract. Use for any user-facing UI work in app/, server/pages/, or packaging/ (login, first-run, shell, mascot, Studio, Bridge).

The Prime-Silo experience — identity, discovery, motion

The product is Prime-Silo. The guide who lives inside it is Agent Benny (the german shepherd). "Space Agent" is a dead upstream name — it must never appear on a user-facing surface (strings, titles, alt text, logos, docs prose). Identifiers (space-desktop: IPC, node space CLI, file names, package names) are protected until Workstream H — do not rename them.

The feeling to build: walking into a quiet, beautifully organized grain silo with a very good dog showing you around. Calm by default; kinetic at the exact moments that deserve it. The marketing site (website/) already nails this — the app must feel like the same product.

1. One palette, two surfaces

All app color resolves through var(--*) tokens in app/L0/_all/mod/_core/framework/css/colors.css (enforced by scripts/gates/c0.mjs — hex literals outside colors.css fail the commit). The family: alabaster/cream grounds, moss/charcoal greens for depth, rust for the ONE primary action, sage/taupe for structure. Depth = the three --elevation-1/2/3 tokens only. Spacing/radius/measure from layout.css, type from type.css (base ≥16px, line-height 1.5, ≤70ch, never justify). Read architecture/DESIGN-SYSTEM.md in full before any CSS — it is short and it is law.

2. Progressive discovery (the ADHD contract, C0)

• One decision per screen. First-run, wizards, and setup flows present exactly one choice, then advance. Never a settings wall.
• One primary action per view, rust-accented, visually dominant. Everything secondary sits behind a consistent More ▸ disclosure.
• Teach by doing. Empty states offer the first action, not documentation ("Drop a PDF to begin"). After the first success, suggest exactly 3 next actions.
• Long work is honest work: always Step n of m + one plain line of "what happens next." Progress lands as a card, never a modal wait.
• Benny narrates transitions in first person, short and warm: "I'll keep your documents on this machine." — never marketing voice inside the product.

3. Motion doctrine — "motion is meaning"

C0 says: no ambient motion; animation only as feedback to user action (mascot micro-states are the sanctioned exception). This is NOT a ban on the animejs.com aesthetic — it is a targeting rule. The website proves the style; the app earns it at these moments:

Sanctioned kinetic moments (choreograph these fully):

1. Threshold moments — login load, first-run steps, section transitions the USER initiated. A step change is user action; a spring-staggered entrance of the next step IS feedback.
2. State becoming visible — a run starting (DAG nodes light in sequence), ingestion progressing (dial arc sweeps to the real fraction), a graph materializing (nodes settle with springs, edges draw with createDrawable). The animation must be DRIVEN BY REAL EVENTS (SSE/EventBus), never a timer pretending. If the data didn't move, the pixels don't move.
3. Benny micro-states — idle (breathing ear/tail, subtle), listening (head tilt on input focus), processing (bound to real SSE activity). The only allowed loop, and it must be quiet.

Forbidden: looping decorative backgrounds, parallax for its own sake, attention-grabbing pulses on idle UI, anything that moves while the user is reading and nothing is happening.

Hard gates on every animation, no exceptions:

const calm =
  matchMedia("(prefers-reduced-motion: reduce)").matches ||
  document.documentElement.dataset.profile === "zen"; // C7 Zen = zero animation
if (calm) return; // final state must already be in the CSS — page complete with zero JS

Vocabulary (same as the website — one motion language): springs with slight overshoot (createSpring({stiffness:120, damping:12})), out(3..5) eases, 500–900ms, stagger(40–80) on anything plural, SVG stroke-draw for diagrams, counters that count to REAL numbers. Use the vendored anime.js v4 ESM — vendor it for the app at app/L0/_all/mod/_prime_silo/vendor/anime.esm.min.js (copy from website/vendor/). The verified v4 API + idioms + mobile rules live in .claude/skills/animejs-scrollcraft/SKILL.md — read it before writing a single animate() call; API drift is the #1 historical failure source.

4. Set-piece patterns (reuse, don't reinvent)

• The Silo (identity moment): stroke-drawn silo assembling from ring segments — login and brand thresholds. Reference implementation: website/build.mjs (heroSiloSvg/siloChapterSvg).
• The Dial (any pipeline): N nodes on a ring, sweeping progress arc, active node blooms, center readout swaps per step. Reference: website/ dial chapter. In-app version binds the arc to real progress (G0 run events / progress.json fractions), not scroll.
• Terminal cinema (honest logs): moss-dark Courier block, typed lines, count-up numbers — for run output surfaces. Never fake the log content.
• Benny walk (guidance): Benny moves along a path between steps of a flow, sits at the active one. Source art: app/L0/_all/mod/_core/visual/res/chat/overlay/dog_no_bg.svg (body parts are commented per-path — split into parts for posing, as website did).

5. First-impression flows (the taste bar)

Login = "enter the silo": alabaster ground, the silo drawing itself once (~1.2s, then still), Benny sitting beside the form, rust primary button, moss focus rings. No gradients from space, no starfields. First-run = four screens, one decision each (welcome → home dir → services check → done); Benny walks the rail between steps; the services check animates real probe results as they return. Every flow must be fully usable — and look intentional, final states in CSS — with JS disabled or reduced-motion on.

6. Verification (what "done" looks like)

1. node scripts/gates/c0.mjs green after ANY CSS touch.
2. Preview at 1280×800 AND 375×812 (the app gets narrow windows too — panes, not pages).
3. prefers-reduced-motion emulation: zero running animations, page fully readable.
4. Zen profile (when C7 lands): same as reduced motion.
5. Screenshot the moment of delight AND the calm resting state — both must pass taste review: would this feel at home next to https://binary16labs.github.io/prime-silo/ ?
6. Grep your diff for Space Agent|space agent — zero user-facing hits.