pinhole

An agentic infra diagrammer built on chant.

Published as @intentius/pinhole; the CLI is pinhole.

pinhole turns chant's resolved infrastructure graph into diagrams. You describe a few resources, chant expands composites and resolves the dependency graph, and pinhole paints it — gated by lint at every step, so the picture is always valid infrastructure. Describe a little, see all the pieces that belong, with the graph verified before anything is drawn.

How it fits

chant owns the deterministic part — a lint-gated graph IR (chant graph --format ir), detail tiers, and lenses. pinhole owns the visual and interactive part: the painter, the design system, the agent loop. pinhole depends on chant as a library; chant never depends on pinhole.

chant source (.ts) ──build/lint──▶ graph IR ──pinhole──▶ diagram
                     (deterministic, auditable)   (layout + paint)

Render paths

• Mermaid — the zero-install default. Renders in GitHub, browsers, and docs with no native dependency. Lower fidelity. (Emitted by chant; see #496.)
• The custom SVG painter — pinhole's own, and the higher-fidelity path. Layout comes from dagre (pure JS — chant's --format layout defaults to it, and the layoutIr / layoutArchitecture library path runs it in-process); pinhole draws the visuals itself. No dot, no native dependency.

Status

Wired to chant 0.44; @intentius/chant ^0.44.3 is the supported floor. pinhole shells chant graph for the graph IR (--format ir) and node positions (--format layout) and paints them with the custom SVG painter; the IR types are imported from @intentius/chant.

chant 0.44 moved the detail dial (chant#1489): a tier now prunes each node's attributes as well as the graph's shape, so a composite-tier (T1) node carries only overlay paint and composite membership. pinhole's default altitude is T1 and its cards print a couple of fields from attrs, so render also reads the resource tier and merges those attributes back onto the nodes T1 left standing — withResourceAttrs, exported for consumers laying out an IR themselves.

The theme system is in (see --theme below). Still to come: the natural-language agent loop.

Usage

npm install
npm run build
pinhole render ./my-chant-project -o infra.svg --title "My infra"

render takes a chant project directory. Options mirror chant graph:

pinhole render ./infra --detail 1            # composites as single nodes
pinhole render ./infra --lens blast:vpc --down   # focus on a node's dependents
pinhole render ./infra --theme blueprint     # dark (default) | light | blueprint

Themes are CSS-variable driven: the chosen theme is baked as fallbacks (so a standalone .svg / <img> / GitHub renders right), and a :root block lets a browser flip --pin-* variables live when the SVG is inlined.

Nodes get a type icon, resolved through a chain: per-node override → lexicon presentation pack → generic category (inferred from the resource kind) → default. The built-in glyphs are monochrome line icons that recolor with the theme.

A pack registered with registerPack is not limited to those. Its iconFor may return a key into the built-in set (a string, as before) or its own geometry:

import { registerPack } from "@intentius/pinhole/icons";

registerPack({
  lexicon: "k8s",
  iconFor: (kind) =>
    kind.endsWith("Deployment")
      ? { body: `<circle cx="16" cy="16" r="12" fill="#326ce5"/>`, colored: true, viewBox: "0 0 32 32" }
      : undefined,
});

colored: true tells the painter to emit the mark as authored — no theme stroke, no fill="none" — which is how a lexicon-native or provider-authentic (brand) icon set plugs in. Without it the geometry is stroked with the theme token like the bundled glyphs. viewBox defaults to 0 0 24 24; any other box is fitted to the icon slot, aspect preserved.

An authored mark lands on a card whose fill pinhole chose, so iconFor gets a second argument saying which fill that is:

registerPack({
  lexicon: "k8s",
  iconFor: (kind, ctx) => ({
    // a plate only where the mark's ink would die, not on every card
    body: ctx?.ground?.includes("warnFill") ? PLATED_MARK : MARK,
    colored: true,
  }),
});

ctx.ground is the exact fill attribute the painter puts on the shape under the glyph, in the same var(--pin-<token>, <baked>) form everything else is painted with — e.g. var(--pin-warnFill, #2A1417). The token name tells you which ground was picked (that is, the node's status); the baked hex is what it looks like in the theme being rendered, which is what contrast math needs. A browser overriding --pin-* live can repaint the ground afterwards, so treat the hex as true for the requested theme, not forever.

It is undefined where pinhole can't answer honestly — the containment views paint at partial opacity, so the glyph reads against a composite, not the fill. A pack that sees undefined should do whatever it did before there was a ground to ask about. The parameter is optional throughout: a pack written as iconFor: (kind) => … still type-checks and still resolves the same glyph.

The @intentius/pinhole/icons subpath is the icon module on its own — no chant, no node builtins — so a browser bundle can register a pack without pulling the CLI's dependencies. It shares a module instance with the package root, so a pack registered through it is the pack renderSvg paints with.

Node bodies show a few fields from the IR attrs (chosen by a template: per-node override → lexicon pack → default scalar attrs). The default portable output draws them as native SVG text — works as a static image and on GitHub. --rich switches to <foreignObject> HTML labels (lists, richer layout) for inlining in a browser; don't use it for static export.

Ambient animation is opt-in and semantic: --highlight <id,…> pulses nodes (emphasis), --flow marches a dash along edges (flow direction). It's CSS, guarded by prefers-reduced-motion, so it animates in a browser and shows a still frame in static exports / on GitHub.

Because pinhole renders chant's lint-gated IR, the picture is always valid infra.

Develop

npm run tsc    # typecheck
npm test       # vitest
npm run build  # bundle to dist/cli.js