@dtmd/temper

A type system for the documents that program agents.

One package, two faces: the temper CLI (a prebuilt binary that needs no runtime once it is on disk) and the typed SDK for authoring a Claude Code harness as a program. The full story, the CLI reference, and the spec corpus live in the repository.

Check a harness

Point it at any repo with a .claude/. No config, no project file, nothing installed:

npx @dtmd/temper check --harness .

It validates every member Claude Code reads, from skills and rules to hooks, MCP servers, and plugin manifests, against the documented Anthropic schemas and best practices, then reports what is malformed, what Claude Code silently ignores, and what a requirement you declared would strand. Every finding arrives with its guidance attached.

Wire the gate into a project

npx @dtmd/temper install

install opens with a report of what it finds in your harness, then asks one question: represent it as a temper program? Answering no wires the advisory session-start report alone, one settings entry. Answering yes converts each discovered artifact into a typed member module, your prose byte-for-byte intact, and runs the first emit.

Author the harness as a program

A harness is a small typed program: members are typed values, composition is ordinary imports, and requirements are declared next to the members that fill them:

import { emit, harness } from "@dtmd/temper";
import { memory_CLAUDE } from "./memory/CLAUDE.ts";
import { rule_collaboration } from "./rules/collaboration.ts";
import { skill_captureFriction } from "./skills/capture-friction.ts";

const program = harness({
  require: {
    "friction-capture-procedure": {
      prose: "an agent that hits harness friction needs a procedure for filing the capture",
      required: true,
    },
  },
  members: [memory_CLAUDE, rule_collaboration, skill_captureFriction],
});

process.stdout.write(emit(program).seam);

temper emit compiles the program into the projected .claude/** files and a lock, byte-for-byte reproducible; it verifies itself by emitting twice. temper check gates against the lock, so it can answer what fills each requirement and what would strand it. A hand edit to a generated file surfaces as drift routed to its authored source, never merged around. The SDK implements no semantics: every type erases at the seam, and the engine consumes only declared data, offline, no Node.

Documentation

• CLI reference, the seven verbs
• How it works, the model in plain words
• Why it exists

Platforms

Prebuilt binaries ship for Linux and Windows (x64), macOS next. On other platforms, build from source with a Rust 1.96+ toolchain (cargo install --path . from a clone of the repository).

License

Dual-licensed under MIT OR Apache-2.0. You may use temper under the terms of either.