effectcraft/AGENTS.md

EffectCraft — rules for agents and contributors

These rules apply to every human and AI contributor. CLAUDE.md holds the working instructions; this file holds the rules that must never be broken. When the two disagree, this file wins.

1. Assets: no Adobe artwork, every asset licensed and attributed

This rule is absolute. Breaking it is the most serious mistake a contributor can make on this project.

What counts as an asset: any image, icon, cursor, logo, illustration, screenshot, font, colour LUT, preset, template, sound, music, video, 3D model, or other non-code media. This covers files in the repository, bytes embedded in code (include_bytes!, base64, data URIs), and data hard-coded to reproduce an image (for example, point lists traced from someone else's icon).

1. Never use Adobe iconography, images or other Adobe assets, in any form:
   • no icons, cursors, logos, splash screens, UI artwork or screenshots from any Adobe product;
   • no Adobe fonts, LUTs, presets, templates, sound effects, stock media or sample projects;
   • no traced, redrawn, recoloured or "inspired-by" copies of Adobe icons. Our icons may follow generic conventions (a play triangle, a razor blade, a stopwatch), but each must be drawn from scratch without reference to Adobe's artwork.
2. Every asset must be open: open-source licensed (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD, ISC, zlib, SIL OFL…), public domain / CC0, or Creative Commons (CC BY or CC BY-SA; no NC/ND licences), or created by a contributor who owns it and licenses it to the project under the project licence (MIT OR Apache-2.0). If the licence is unknown or unclear, the asset does not go in.
3. Every asset needs an attribution sidecar. Next to each asset file X, add X.attribution with:

   asset:        <file name>
   title:        <what it is>
   author:       <creator / copyright holder>
   source:       <URL, or "original work" for contributor-made assets>
   license:      <SPDX id or licence name>
   license-file: <path to the licence text, if the licence requires shipping it>
   added:        <YYYY-MM-DD> by <contributor>
   notes:        <how it was made or modified; for screenshots, what is shown>
   

   Also add one line for the asset to ATTRIBUTION.md. cargo xtask assets (part of cargo xtask ci) fails if any asset lacks a sidecar or index entry.
4. Screenshots in the repo may show only EffectCraft (or other open projects), with media we generated or media that is itself openly licensed. Never commit screenshots of Adobe products.
5. Local reference material stays local. After Effects reference screenshots and notes live only in plan/aftereffects/ (gitignored). They must never be committed, bundled, embedded, traced or shipped.
6. Code-drawn assets (icons in crates/ui-egui/src/icons.rs, procedural demo content in crates/engine/src/demo.rs, generators in crates/effects) are original work under the project licence and are listed in ATTRIBUTION.md.
7. When in doubt, leave it out and draw or generate it yourself.
8. The one exception: first-party ArtCraft brand marks. The ArtCraft name and logos in docs/brand/ (supplied by the ArtCraft team) are trademarks, all rights reserved, used with permission. They still need a sidecar and an ATTRIBUTION.md row (licence LicenseRef-ArtCraft-Trademark). No other non-open asset is allowed, and this exception never covers third-party marks (Adobe, Discord, GitHub and other logos stay out; draw a generic icon instead).

2. Clean-room code

• Never read, disassemble or copy anything inside Adobe application bundles; file names and listings only. Observe behaviour by using the app; never capture its Home screen, recent projects, account info or file browsers.
• Never copy GPL/LGPL/AGPL code (FFmpeg, Natron, Blender, Glaxnimate, Synfig, Friction, Olive, MLT, frei0r, G'MIC…).
• Never read or copy Adobe expression/scripting implementations, .ffx presets or effect plug-ins; the public Expression Language Reference and Scripting Guide describe behaviour only.
• Implement codecs and formats from public specifications (ITU-T/ISO/IEC standards, IETF RFCs, the VP9 and AV1 bitstream specs, SMPTE documents, published container specs). Do not read the source of reference or third-party decoders/encoders while implementing a format, even permissively licensed ones (libvpx, libopus, libaom, dav1d, openh264…); spec text and conformance vectors only. Record the spec edition used in the crate README.
• ffmpeg/ffprobe may be used only as external test oracles and fixture generators. They are never linked, bundled or shipped.
• Dependencies must use permissive licences: MIT/Apache-2.0/BSD/ISC/Zlib/Unicode/CC0/BSL-1.0, or MPL-2.0 used unmodified.

3. Engineering rules

See CLAUDE.md: pure Rust, dependency layering (cargo xtask layers), exact Tick time, everything is a command, everything is agent-drivable, and the quality gates (cargo xtask ci) before every commit.

See also

• CONTRIBUTING.md and docs/contributing.md: setup, gates, commits, how to add things
• docs/architecture.md: layers, data model, commands, pipeline
• docs/testing.md: oracle tests, criteria, benchmarks
• docs/agents.md: driving EffectCraft over MCP / the control channel, and the agent work loop
• docs/control-protocol.md: control-channel method reference
• ATTRIBUTION.md: asset index