Files
do-operator 87d3407873 feat(docs-site): align the docs with the bmadcode design system, and move diagrams to themed SVG (#2850)
* feat(website): restyle the docs in the bmadcode design system

The docs carried a Ghost-blog theme: Inter and Space Grotesk, a #3b82f6
accent, 12px radii, tinted panels and hover lifts. bmadcode.com is built
from the foundry ramp on paper, Archivo and IBM Plex Mono, one
accent held under ~2% of the page, 2px corners and hairlines. This aligns
the two so the method and its documentation read as one thing.

Four type registers, and almost nothing else: Instrument Serif for the
page masthead, Archivo 600 for headings, Archivo 400 at 17px for prose,
and IBM Plex Mono at 11px for labels — spent once per section, never on
prose or a table header. The measure comes down to 46rem so a page reads
as an article.

Also fixes the site title, which was the only place in the repo spelling
the brand "BMAD Method"; it now matches the prose, and every page title
and share card with it.

The four component overrides are the parts CSS could not reach: the mark
in its ink tile, the accent eyebrow naming each section, and the dark
footer band. The footer renders from TwoColumnContent rather than the
Footer slot because Starlight right-aligns the content column
(--sl-content-margin-inline: auto 0), so a band in that column never
reached the sidebar edge.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* feat(website): inline hand-authored SVG diagrams

Diagrams shipped as rasters: build-diagram.png at 488 KB, plus a -fr and
a -ko export of the same picture. Every translation meant re-exporting an
image, three of the five locales fell back to the English one, and none
of them could follow the site's light and dark themes.

Diagrams are now hand-authored SVGs carrying geometry and classes only.
A rehype plugin inlines them where a page links to one, so a single
stylesheet themes every diagram — an <img> is opaque to page CSS, which
is the whole reason for inlining. A second diagram written against the
same class vocabulary matches the first without any styling work.

Labels are translated rather than redrawn: each <text> carries a data-i18n
key and the strings live in <name>.labels.json, so one drawing serves
every language and a translation cannot drift out of shape.

The integration exists because the inlined SVG lands inside Astro's
content layer cache, which is keyed on the markdown file. Editing a
diagram left the previous drawing on the page, through a build that
reported success. It watches the diagram directory in dev and drops the
content store when the drawing changes.

Diagram.astro is the same behaviour for anywhere that can take a
component. The docs are 193 .md files and no .mdx, where components
cannot be imported, so the plugin is the path pages actually use.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs(build): draw the bmad-build run as a themed SVG

Replaces build-diagram.png and its -fr and -ko exports with one drawing
shared by all five locales: the actors in a left lane, the spine down the
middle, a return channel for BAD_SPEC and INTENT_GAP, and the review
lenses in a panel — the layout the original had.

Gzipped, the diagram goes from 440 KB to 1 KB, and it now follows the
theme. The French labels are in place; the other locales fall back to the
English text in the SVG, which is what their pages showed before.

The raster files stay for now: walk-through-a-change still uses
walkthrough-diagram, and that conversion is a separate change.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(website): let the diagram cache stamp survive a fresh checkout

The stamp is written into Astro's cache directory, which does not exist
until Astro creates it partway through the build. On a clean clone — CI,
every time — the integration threw in astro:config:done and took the
build with it.

It now creates the directory, and treats any failure as a warning: a
cache that cannot be stamped is a slower build, not a broken one.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs(walkthrough): draw the walkthrough run as a themed SVG

Replaces walkthrough-diagram.png and its -fr and -ko exports with one
drawing shared by all five locales, keeping the original's layout: the
two inputs in a left lane, the five stages down the spine, the notes
beside them, the early exit skipping the middle, and the three outcomes
along the bottom.

The outcome chips introduce a `chip` class in the shared stylesheet,
taking the green and amber the asides already use, so a green in a
diagram is the same green as a tip. Nothing else about this diagram
needed styling: it inherits the vocabulary build-run established.

With both diagrams converted, website/public/diagrams is empty and the
six raster files are gone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs(plan): fold the remaining diagrams into the themed pipeline

planning-skills, development-paths and bmad-delivery-loop were already
SVG, but outside the pipeline in three ways: they carried their own
palettes, they were served as <img> so page CSS could not reach them,
and two of them shipped a -ko twin that duplicated the geometry to
translate the labels.

Two were drawn dark — navy grounds, white text, cyan strokes — so on a
light docs page they sat as dark panels. Their palettes are mapped onto
the shared tokens, which flips them correctly in both themes, and their
backdrops are dropped: a diagram sits on the page's ground rather than
painting its own. The hardcoded typefaces go too, so they inherit
Archivo and IBM Plex Mono like everything else.

The Korean strings are lifted out of the -ko files into the label files,
matched by document order, so all five diagrams are now one drawing per
diagram. docs/images is empty.

Also fixes the cache guard, which was clearing the wrong store: build
writes to the cache directory, dev writes to .astro beside the config,
and the stamp was shared between them so whichever ran first consumed
the invalidation. It is now per command and build-only — deleting the
store under a running dev server leaves the content layer unable to
render, so dev needs a restart after a diagram edit instead.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): align the imported diagrams with the shared vocabulary

Mapping the old palettes onto the theme tokens made those three diagrams
theme-aware, but not part of the system. They still carried 8-16px
corners, painted their own canvas panel or background grid, drew every
connector in the accent, and left arrowheads baked to a colour of their
own — so next to build-run and walkthrough-run they read as imports.

They now use the same roles as the two authored diagrams: .node for
boxes, .edge for connectors, .head for arrowheads, 2px corners, and no
self-painted ground. Accent drops out of all five: it is for the one
thing a drawing points at, which here is a single .node.hot on the
destination box rather than a green that read as a status.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* chore(docs-site): record hast-util-from-html in the lockfile

The dependency was declared in package.json during the move to docs-site
but its entry never reached the lockfile's root block, so the two
disagreed about what the site depends on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): land the arrowheads on their targets in build-run

Three arrows pointed at glyphs rather than at boxes, and all three fell
short: DEFER stopped 10px from the document and aimed at its corner
instead of its body, REJECT stopped 27px from the discard glyph, and the
result returning to you stopped 21px from the person.

The boxes were fine throughout — every arrow into a node already landed
within 2px. What the three had in common is that a glyph sits inside a
translated group, so eyeballing them against the drawing's coordinates
put the endpoints in the wrong place.

Measured across all twenty arrowheads in screen space afterwards: the
largest remaining gap is 3px.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): move the DEFER label off its own curve, and clear the
 cache on a dev start too

Re-aiming the DEFER arrow at the document glyph swung its curve left,
straight through the label that had been sitting clear of the old path.
The label moves into the pocket between Present and the curve.

Checking it exposed a worse problem: dev was still serving the previous
drawing after a restart, so the fix looked like it had not applied. The
cache guard had been narrowed to build-only after clearing the store
under a live dev server broke rendering — but that failure came from
clearing on a mid-session restart, and the watch that caused those is
gone. On a cold start, before the content layer loads, clearing is safe
in both commands. Confirmed by probe: edit a diagram, restart dev, the
edit is served, no errors.

So the limitation is now what it was documented to be. Previously an
edited diagram needed a full build before dev would show it.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): give every connector an arrowhead, and clear the boxes

Three defects in development-paths, all inherited from the import:

Connectors were written as two subpaths in one path element. A marker-end
lands on the last vertex of a path, so only the second segment ever drew
a head — which is why Change—Edit had none and Edit→Verify did. Four
connectors are now separate paths, and all twelve carry a head.

The two routed connectors ended exactly on the box they point at, so the
arrowhead sat on the border. They stop 4px clear.

The epic row was 140/130/130 wide with the labels centred on each box.
All three are 140 now, evenly spaced, with the connectors and labels
following.

Band backgrounds were imported as .node, which made every check treat a
connector crossing its own band as an error. They are .band now: same
appearance, but the drawing says what it means.

Also moves the DEFER label in build-run back alongside its curve. The
previous fix pushed it clear of the line and lost the association.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): one stroke weight across all five drawings

build-run and walkthrough-run carry no inline stroke-width — the
stylesheet owns it, at 1.5 for a connector and 1 for a box. The three
imported drawings still carried their own: 2, 3, 4 and 2.5, so their
lines were twice as heavy as the authored ones.

That is also what made the arrowhead into "Build × stories" look wrong.
A marker scales with stroke-width by default, so a head defined at 7
units rendered at 21px on a 3px line instead of 10.5px. On a 9px final
drop it overshot the corner and sat on the horizontal run above the box.

Sixty inline stroke-widths are gone, and the two routed connectors get a
longer final drop so the head has room to sit on.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* test(docs-site): cover rehype-inline-diagrams, and fix what it caught

Twelve tests alongside the existing plugin suite, against a temporary
site root: what gets inlined and what is left alone, label substitution
per locale with fallback to the authored English, the accessible name,
and the mtime-keyed re-read the dev server depends on.

The first run failed on the accessible name, and it was right to. hast
camel-cases ARIA attributes, so the guard read `aria-labelledby` and
found nothing — meaning every diagram's own <title> was being replaced
by the markdown alt text. build-run and walkthrough-run both title
themselves with a sentence describing the whole run, and both were
announcing a four-word alt instead.

Now 119 assertions, and a diagram that names itself keeps its name.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(diagrams): recover the Korean walkthrough labels, and correct the guide

Review caught two things.

The style guide sent contributors to website/src/diagrams/, the path
this branch renamed. A diagram placed there would never be found by the
loader or localized.

The second is a regression this branch introduced and the PR described
wrongly. It claimed the non-English pages "fall back to the English text
in the SVG, which is what their pages showed before". That is untrue for
four pages: they had localized exports, and replacing those with one
drawing plus an English-only label file puts English labels in front of
readers who previously had their own language.

walkthrough-diagram-ko.svg was an SVG, so its Korean is recoverable and
is now the ko-KR label set for walkthrough-run — all 22 keys. The other
three were .webp exports, so their text cannot be lifted out:

  ko-kr build-a-change        build-run ko-KR       0/30 keys
  fr    explanation/build     build-run fr-FR      13/30 keys
  fr    build/walk-through    walkthrough fr-FR     0/22 keys

Those need a translator. The 13 French keys are mine and unreviewed.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* i18n(diagrams): complete the French and Korean diagram labels

Fills the three gaps review found: build-run had no Korean and only 13
of 30 French keys, walkthrough-run had no French. All four sets are now
complete.

Terms come from the repository rather than fresh coinage. Korean reuses
what the -ko diagrams and the Korean pages already established — 의도,
구체화, 계획, 검토, 결과, 사양 — and French follows the vocabulary of
docs/fr/explanation/build.md: revue, intention, résultat, implémentation,
spécification, and visite guidée from the French walkthrough page.

The uppercase edge tokens stay as they are. PATCH, REJECT, BAD_SPEC,
INTENT_GAP and DEFER appear in no locale's prose, so they read as
protocol constants, the way bmad-build and path:line are already left
alone in the Korean set.

French runs longer than English and these are fixed-geometry drawings,
so both French pages and the Korean one were checked for labels
overflowing their box, sitting on a connector, or colliding: none.

These are my translations, not a native speaker's. Worth a pass from
whoever owns each locale before release.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(docs-site): satisfy the repo's lint and format rules in the new tests

The diagram tests used .forEach to walk the hast tree, which this repo's
eslint config rejects (unicorn/no-array-for-each), and the file was not
Prettier-formatted. CI had been failing on lint since the tests landed.

Rewritten as for…of and formatted. Verified against every gate the
workflow runs — lint, format:check, test, build — rather than the build
alone.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* docs(website): describe the source of the theme without naming a private repo

The comments cited the private repository and file paths it was ported
from. They point at bmadcode.com instead, which is the public thing a
reader can actually check.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

* fix(website): keep footer links in the reader's language

The footer prefixed only BASE_URL to root-locale paths, so a French or
Korean reader following any internal link landed on the English page and
lost their language for the rest of the visit.

The links now carry the page's locale. Every target exists under every
locale — Starlight generates the untranslated ones as fallbacks — so this
is safe rather than a trade of one broken link for another: all 36
routes, 6 links across 6 locales, resolve in the built site.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>

---------

Co-authored-by: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>
2026-09-09 01:26:54 -04:00

9.9 KiB

title, description, sidebar
title description sidebar
Build a Change Use bmad-build to turn a request, issue, spec, or story into implemented and reviewed code.
order
1

The core implementation skill is bmad-build. It takes any expression of what you want — a sentence, an issue, a spec, or a planned story — investigates the codebase and upstream context, then plans the change, implements it, reviews the result, and fixes the bugs it finds. See how a run works.

Size the Work

Use the smallest amount of BMad that safely fits the change. A typical session is one goal: about 500 lines of code added or changed (not counting tests) in a small handful of files. If it fits, give it to bmad-build. If it doesn't, plan that bigger piece of work first — see Choose a Planning Path. You often cannot tell until you try; if you aren't sure, ask bmad-help.

For a trivial edit you are willing to review yourself, skip the process and ask the agent to make it directly. But if a bug could escape into production, bmad-build is likely worth it.

Run bmad-build

The bmad-build run

1. Start a Fresh Chat

Open a fresh chat in your AI IDE. Reusing a session from another workflow can mix contexts and confuse the run.

2. Give It Your Intent

You can describe the change before, with, or after the command. It does not have to be tidy. A ramble, a voice dump, a half-formed thought, an issue link, a file, or a planned story all work — anything the model can turn into a concrete goal.

/bmad-build Fix the login validation bug that allows empty passwords.
/bmad-build Fix https://github.com/org/repo/issues/42.
/bmad-build Implement the intent in
_bmad-output/implementation-artifacts/my-intent.md.
I think the problem is in the auth middleware, it's not checking token expiry.
Let me look at it... yeah, src/auth/middleware.ts line 47 skips
the exp check entirely. /bmad-build
/bmad-build
> What would you like to do?
Refactor UserService to use async/await instead of callbacks.

3. Resolve Intent from Evidence

bmad-build starts from your request and investigates the codebase and any upstream planning artifacts before deciding whether anything material is still missing. The input can start rough; clear, evidence-supported requests proceed without a clarification turn. When something is unclear, it looks for evidence first — only what the repository and planning context cannot settle becomes an open question on a finished design, not an interview before work starts.

Answer open questions carefully when they appear. A wrong call there is the most expensive kind of mistake to find later.

4. Approve a Plan When Asked

After investigation, bmad-build routes to the smallest safe path. It reports three facts about the settled design: intent gaps (things you did not say that you would notice in the result), irreversible actions, and footprint. A design clean on all three takes the light path — a minimal spec and implementation in the same session, reviewed afterwards. Anything flagged gets a full written plan first, with each intent gap recorded as an open question you answer before approval.

Approve the plan when it describes the right thing to build. Push back if it does not — fixing the plan is cheaper than fixing the code.

5. Implementation and Review

After that decision, bmad-build implements the change, reviews its own work with independent reviewers, fixes problems that belong to this change, and commits locally. This works best on a platform that can spawn subagents, or at least call another model from the command line and wait for a result.

Review is triage, not a dump of every possible note. Issues that belong to the current change get fixed. Unrelated pre-existing issues get deferred. If the code is wrong because the plan was weak, or the plan is wrong because the goal was wrong, it goes back to that layer and regenerates from there instead of patching only the diff.

For a standalone review — a PR, someone else's change, an extra pass, or a review bot — see Review a Change.

6. Review the Result

When it finishes, bmad-build gives you a short summary and offers the usual next steps: create a PR, walk through the change, or make another change. For a guided review of the finished work, see Walk Through a Change.

  • Run the walkthrough or skim the diff to confirm the change matches your intent
  • If something looks off, tell the agent what to fix — it can iterate in the same session

Once you are satisfied, ask it to push the commit and create a PR for you.

:::caution[If Something Breaks] If a pushed change causes unexpected issues, use git revert HEAD to undo the last commit cleanly. Then start a fresh chat and run bmad-build again with a different approach. :::

What You Get

  • Modified source files with the change applied
  • Passing tests (if your project has a test suite)
  • A ready-to-push commit with a conventional commit message
  • An implementation record for the run, kept beside the parent spec or story when there is one

For generated API and end-to-end coverage of the finished work, see Test Completed Work.

Deferred Work

Each run stays focused on one goal. If your request contains several independent goals, or review finds pre-existing issues unrelated to your change, bmad-build writes them to deferred-work.md in your implementation artifacts directory instead of trying to do everything at once.

Check that file after a run — it is a backlog of follow-ups. You can feed each item into a fresh bmad-build run later.

When to Plan First

Add a spec, or PRD, UX, architecture, and story planning, before running bmad-build when:

  • The change affects multiple systems or needs coordinated updates across many files
  • You are unsure about the scope and need requirements discovery first
  • You need documentation or architectural decisions recorded for the team
  • Clarifying the intent keeps surfacing contradictions that one session cannot resolve

Larger work becomes a sequence of one-session changes. That sequence can change as implementation teaches you more. Parent specs keep the shared goal; story records carry decisions and completion state; integration checks and retrospectives cover the combined result. bmad-build handles one unit. It does not own the backlog, pick the next story, or replace those later checks.

Use bmad-build for foundational, risky, or important stories where your decisions may set patterns for later work. Once those patterns are stable, bmad-build-auto can run one unit without waiting for you; see Autonomous Development Loops.

Implementation Skills

Skill Purpose Produces
bmad-build Implement and review one direct intent or planned story with human checkpoints (this page) Implementation record + code
bmad-build-auto Implement and review one unit unattended for a caller or orchestrator (Autonomous Development Loops) Implementation record + code + terminal status
bmad-code-review Review any code change with several independent reviewers (Review a Change) Findings + applied patches
bmad-correct-course Assess the impact of a significant mid-sprint change (Break Work into Stories and Track It) Updated plan or re-routing
bmad-retrospective Review a completed epic against the evidence it left behind (Finish an Epic) Retro document, action items, acceptance verdict

Clear one-session work enters bmad-build directly. A spec-backed epic uses Story Breakdown to create several units under one SPEC.md; a project adds a PRD, UX, architecture, epics, readiness results, and sprint tracking before selecting each unit. bmad-build-auto does not orchestrate those units: an AI coding session or another orchestrator, such as bmad-loop, dispatches one worker per unit. See Autonomous Development Loops for the worker and orchestration contracts.

Why Does This Take So Long? I Could Plan Mode and Code It in Ten Minutes

You can. The plan-and-implement half of bmad-build usually takes about as long, and it usually needs a couple fewer turns from you. It then reviews the result thoroughly, triages the findings, and automatically fixes the ones worth fixing. "Plan mode and code" does none of this. You have to invoke a review by hand, then spend time disposing of every finding — including the noisy and unrelated ones. See Review a Change.

Human attention is by far the most expensive resource, and the productivity bottleneck in AI-backed software development.

For a throwaway prototype, or a trivial change you will review yourself, skip the process; see Size the Work. Or tell bmad-build to take the one-shot route, or to skip review. But if you are serious about the quality of the product, just let the process run and spend your attention where it is irreplaceable. That extra time and inference is worth it.