Why and When to Use OpenProse: what it is for, when it wins, and when not to reach for it
Agent Onboarding: the checked path for a coding agent entering the repo cold
Public Surface: a compact map of the compiler, planner, package, runtime, and hosted surfaces
Measuring OpenProse: reproducible ways to measure package quality, selective recompute, approval gating, and reference-company health
Evidence Classes: what each confidence rung covers
Inference Examples: Pi-backed graph VM examples, model provider setup, and live harness evidence
Single-Run Handoff: the boundary for exporting one component contract to a compatible one-off harness
Subagents and Private State: intra-node child sessions, private state refs, Catch recovery, and harness portability
Package Publication: the source workspace versus generated CLI artifact boundary
Hosted Runtime Contract: the fixture boundary shared by OSS and the hosted platform
Schema Validation: what typed ports enforce versus what remains semantic package metadata
Runtime Confidence Gate: confidence matrix, release criteria, and generated confidence evidence
Diagrams: HTML diagrams for the compiler, reactive planning, inference meta-harness, packages, approvals, and runtime backpressure
Examples: the curated example set for the local-first runtime model

Quickstart

From this repo:

bun install
bun run prose compile examples/north-star/company-signal-brief.prose.md
bun run prose plan examples/north-star/lead-program-designer.prose.md \
  --input lead_profile='{"company":"Acme","pain":"manual agent handoffs"}' \
  --input brand_context="OpenProse is React for agent outcomes." \
  --target-output lead_program_plan
bun run prose graph examples/north-star/release-proposal-dry-run.prose.md \
  --input release_candidate="v0.11.0"
bun run prose handoff examples/north-star/company-signal-brief.prose.md \
  --input signal_notes="Customer teams want durable agent workflows." \
  --input brand_context="OpenProse is React for agent outcomes."
bun run prose run examples/north-star/company-signal-brief.prose.md \
  --run-id docs-company-signal \
  --input signal_notes="Customer teams want durable agent workflows." \
  --input brand_context="OpenProse is React for agent outcomes." \
  --output company_signal_brief="Hello from the local runtime."
bun run prose status .prose/runs
bun run prose trace .prose/runs/docs-company-signal
bun run measure:examples
bun run confidence:runtime
bun run smoke:cold-start
bun run smoke:agent-onboarding
bun run smoke:live-pi

Distribution

The repo root is a source workspace, not the public npm artifact. Use bun run prose ... while developing here. bun run build:binary creates dist/prose and writes a dist-specific package.json whose bin.prose points at the compiled binary.

Mental Model

OpenProse source is readable Markdown, but it compiles into an executable contract:

canonical .prose.md source
a deterministic Prose IR
graph planning and selective recompute
durable run materialization through the local Pi-backed meta-harness
package metadata, install, search, and publish checks
hosted graph/run/approval surfaces over the same IR and run model

RFCs are design history. These docs describe the system a user runs.