HyperFrames CLI

Everything runs through npx hyperframes unless project instructions specify a local wrapper. Obey the local wrapper exactly. Requires Node.js >= 22 and FFmpeg.

Workflow

1. Scaffold — npx hyperframes init my-video (or capture from a URL). init also checks the installed skills against the latest on GitHub and updates the global set if any are out of date. The --skip-skills flag is currently neutered (temporary, while the skills.sh registry catches up), so every init runs this check and pulls our latest skills regardless.
2. Write — author HTML composition (see the hyperframes-core skill)
3. Lint — npx hyperframes lint
4. Validate — npx hyperframes validate (runtime errors + contrast)
5. Visual inspect — npx hyperframes inspect
6. Preview — npx hyperframes preview opens Studio, the timeline editor where the user can manually edit anything (not just watch). Review there, then ask before rendering.
7. Render — pick the variant:
   • Iterate: npx hyperframes render --quality draft
   • Deliver: npx hyperframes render --quality high --output out.mp4
   • CI / cross-host repro: npx hyperframes render --docker --strict --output out.mp4
   • Cloud (long / large): npx hyperframes lambda render ./my-project --width 1920 --height 1080 --wait (see Lambda below)

Run lint, validate, and inspect before preview. lint catches missing data-composition-id, overlapping tracks, and unregistered timelines. validate loads the composition in headless Chrome and reports runtime console errors plus WCAG contrast issues. inspect seeks through the timeline and reports text spilling out of bubbles/containers or off the canvas — and, when a *.motion.json sidecar is present, verifies motion intent (entrances firing under seek, stagger order, in-frame, liveness) against that same seeked timeline.

For motion-heavy work, prefer snapshot-driven iteration and a *.motion.json sidecar — see references/lint-validate-inspect.md for the discipline and motion-verification spec.

Agent Conventions

Cross-cutting rules that hold for every command:

• --json is available on every command except render, preview, and play. Use it for any agent / CI invocation of the supported commands; output includes a _meta envelope (cli version, latest available, update advice). render reports status via stdout + exit code only — verify success with the post-render check below; preview / play are servers, no JSON.
• doctor --json always exits 0, even when the environment is broken. Gate on the payload's ok field: npx hyperframes doctor --json | jq -e '.ok' > /dev/null. This insulates pipelines from CLI release churn.
• Non-TTY mode is auto-detected. When stdout is not a TTY (CI, agents, piped output) the CLI auto-switches to non-interactive; init then requires --example. Pass --non-interactive to force this mode even on a TTY.
• CI gating on render: --strict fails on lint errors, --strict-all fails on warnings too, --strict-variables fails on undeclared --variables keys.
• Paths in --json are redacted — $HOME becomes the literal $HOME so output is safe to paste into bug reports and agent contexts.
• Render is user-gated. Never auto-render once the checks pass. Pause at preview, tell the user the video is editable in Studio, and render only after they approve.
• Post-render verification. After render returns exit 0, confirm the output file exists and has plausible size before reporting success: [ -s "$OUTPUT" ] || echo "render produced no output". The CLI prints ◇ <path> on success; for long renders also sanity-check duration with ffprobe -i "$OUTPUT" -show_format -v error.

Routing

Want to…	Read
Scaffold a project (init, capture, skills)	references/init-and-scaffold.md
Check correctness (lint, validate, inspect, snapshot)	references/lint-validate-inspect.md
Preview or render (preview, play, render, publish)	references/preview-render.md
Diagnose the environment (doctor, browser)	references/doctor-browser.md
Cloud render on AWS Lambda (lambda deploy / sites / render / progress / destroy / policies)	references/lambda.md
Everything else (info, upgrade, compositions, docs, benchmark, telemetry, asset preprocessing)	references/upgrade-info-misc.md

Cross-Skill Hand-Offs

• Tailwind projects (init --tailwind) → use hyperframes-core (Tailwind reference) before editing classes or theme tokens.
• Registry blocks/components (hyperframes add, hyperframes catalog) → use hyperframes-registry for install paths, sub-composition wiring, and snippet merging.
• Asset preprocessing (tts, transcribe, remove-background) → use hyperframes-media for voice selection, Whisper model rules, captions, and TTS-to-captions chain.
• Parametrized renders (--variables) → declared via data-composition-variables on <html>; see hyperframes-core for the full schema.

Lambda (Cloud Rendering)

hyperframes lambda deploys distributed rendering to AWS Lambda and drives renders from your laptop or CI. End-to-end is three commands:

npx hyperframes lambda deploy                                             # provision SAM stack (Lambda + Step Functions + S3)
npx hyperframes lambda render ./my-project --width 1920 --height 1080 --wait
npx hyperframes lambda destroy                                            # tear down (S3 bucket is retained)

Use Lambda when a render is too long / too large for one host (multi-minute videos, 4K, large parallel batches) and you have AWS credentials configured. For dev-loop iteration stay on local render.

See references/lambda.md for prerequisites, all 6 subcommands (deploy, sites create, render, progress, destroy, policies), IAM policy validation, state files, and cost / cleanup rules.

Minimum Completion Gate

Static gates

npx hyperframes lint
npx hyperframes validate

Add inspect for layout-sensitive work and render --strict in CI to fail on lint errors.

Visual smoke test — required when the project uses sub-compositions

lint / validate / inspect evaluate each composition in isolation. They never load index.html and mount sub-compositions via data-composition-src, so they cannot catch cross-file mount failures (see hyperframes-core → references/sub-compositions.md, "Common pitfalls"). The only gate that catches them is one that actually loads index.html and seeks the timeline.

Use hyperframes snapshot — it loads the project the same way render does (so it exercises the same mount path) but only captures the timestamps you request, so it's seconds instead of a full render:

# Capture one frame at the midpoint of every sub-composition.
# Midpoints = data-start + data-duration/2 for each host slot in index.html.
npx hyperframes snapshot --at <t1>,<t2>,<t3>,...

# Or, if you don't need per-scene targeting, an evenly-spaced sample:
npx hyperframes snapshot --frames 9

Output lands in snapshots/frame-NN-at-Xs.png. Eyeball each frame against the scene plan.

Per-frame red flags (each maps to a specific failure mode the static gates miss):

What you see	Root cause
Text shows up tiny + unstyled in the top-left corner	<style> block left in <head> outside <template> (Pitfall 1) — no CSS reached live DOM
SVG/icon elements blown up to canvas-size	Same as above — no width/height constraints applied
Hero element of the scene is missing entirely; only background + watermark visible	Host-id ≠ template id (Pitfall 2) — timeline never ran, frame captured at initial state
Snapshot command logs Sub-composition timelines not registered after 45000ms	Pitfall 2 — direct confirmation

snapshots/ can be deleted after eyeballing; the user-facing final render is a separate pass with npx hyperframes render.