PhotoCraft is an open-source, native, Photoshop-comparable image editor written in **Rust only** (no JavaScript or TypeScript). **No Tauri, Electron or webview shells:** the desktop app is native egui/eframe on wgpu, and the web build is the same Rust compiled to WebAssembly (trunk + wasm-bindgen). Never add Tauri (or any webview/JS UI framework) as a dependency, build step or packaging target. The product name is always written **PhotoCraft** (`{Function}Craft` in PascalCase, like its siblings ArtCraft, ArtCraftX, DesignCraft, VectorCraft, EffectCraft, FilmCraft, LightCraft, PdfCraft) in user-facing text: UI, window titles, About, installers, release names, docs prose. Machine names stay lowercase: crates (`photocraft-*`), binaries, file names, ids (`ai.storyteller.photocraft`). Standards and learnings shared across the crafting apps live in `../craftrules` (read its `README.md`; the repository is not public — outside contributors should ask a maintainer for the standards relevant to their change). Contribute reusable learnings there; shared Rust components live in [storytold/craft-libs](https://github.com/storytold/craft-libs) and are pinned by immutable git revision. UI libraries stay at L6. The goal is 1:1 Photoshop parity (same menus, shortcuts, behaviour and file fidelity) with better performance, and every feature drivable by agents. Read this file first, then `docs/`.
| [photocraft-corpus](https://github.com/storytold/photocraft-corpus) + `docs/development.md`› Test corpora | Real-file test oracles (our Photoshop-authored PSDs); with psd-tools, ag-psd and PngSuite fetched into `corpus/` by `cargo xtask corpus --all` at the pins in `xtask/src/corpus_pins.rs` |
**Layering is enforced** by `cargo xtask layers`. A crate may depend only on lower layers. `psd`, `codecs` and `cms` depend on nothing in the workspace. Nothing below `ui-egui` may use egui, eframe, winit or rfd. A new crate must be registered in `xtask/src/layers.rs`.
People trust PhotoCraft with their work, and a crash loses it. A malformed file, a bad command or MCP param, a corrupt settings file, an odd keystroke or a full disk must produce an error the user or agent can act on, never a panic. Don't ship a feature by adding a panic path; fix a crash before building on top of it. The shared standard is `../craftrules/standards/never-crash.md`.
- **Non-test code never panics.** No `unwrap()`, `expect()`, `panic!`, `unreachable!`, `todo!` or `unimplemented!`. Return the crate's error type and propagate with `?`; use `ok_or(..)?`, `let .. else { return Err(..) }`, `if let`, or `unwrap_or*` where a fallback is truly correct (never one that silently corrupts a document). Unfinished features return an "unsupported" error. The only exception is a provably infallible literal: `#[allow(clippy::expect_used)]` plus `.expect("why it can't fail")`.
- **No `unsafe`.** The workspace sets `unsafe_code = "forbid"`. The one exception is the isolated helper crate `photocraft-tablet` (`crates/tablet`): winit drops pen tablet data, and reading it on macOS needs an AppKit event monitor (Objective-C interop). Only its `src/macos.rs` allows `unsafe` (`unsafe_code = "deny"` crate-wide, every block has a `SAFETY:` comment, tested against real `NSEvent`s); its X11 path and all mapping code are safe. Don't add `unsafe` anywhere else.
- **Input-derived numbers are hostile.** Use `get()` rather than `[i]`/`[a..b]` for indices from files, params, selections or arithmetic on them; slice strings only at char boundaries; use `checked_*`/`saturating_*` for lengths, offsets and counts; guard division by zero and NaN/inf casts; cap allocations sized by input.
- **Bound recursion** with depth limits or seen-sets (documents can be deep or cyclic).
- **Don't cascade.** Handle lock poisoning (`lock().unwrap_or_else(PoisonError::into_inner)`) and treat thread joins as `Result`s.
- **Last-resort guard.** The app shell must catch an escaped panic around command dispatch and file import/export, reports it as an error and keeps the document. It's a safety net, not a licence to panic. Keep `panic = "unwind"`.
- **Prove it.** Every crash fix comes with a small synthetic regression test that panicked before the fix.
- **Enforced by clippy.** `clippy.toml` allows `unwrap`/`expect`/`panic`/indexing in tests only. Clean crates carry `#![deny(clippy::unwrap_used, clippy::expect_used, clippy::panic, clippy::unimplemented, clippy::todo, clippy::unreachable)]`; new crates start with it.
1.**Everything is a command.** New user-visible behaviour = a command in the engine (`crates/engine/src/*_cmds.rs`, registered in `commands.rs`) with id, label, menu path, shortcut, params doc, `enabled` and `run`, plus tests. The UI, CLI, control channel and MCP all dispatch commands by id. Use the **exact id from `crates/ui-egui/src/menu_catalog.rs`** and the menu item goes live automatically. Only pure view/window state (zoom, panels, screen mode) belongs to the shell (`menus.rs``UI_COMMANDS`).
2.**No format or colour assumptions.** Bit depth (8/16/32f) and colour model (RGB/Gray/CMYK/Lab…) are runtime data. Never introduce a `u8`-only pixel path in public APIs. Never assume sRGB: colour conversions go through `photocraft-cms` (`Transform`, `transform::cached`). Test at several depths.
3.**Clean-room.** We studied Photoshop and other proprietary editors for *behaviour and look only*. Never copy their code, shaders, profiles or assets. Implement from public specs (Adobe PSD spec, ICC, ISO 32000 blend modes, papers) and observation. Third-party assets must be permissively licensed, keep their license file next to them, and get a row in `ATTRIBUTION.md` (path, title, author, source, license) in the same change; so do original assets. The ArtCraft logos in `docs/brand/` are not open source (`docs/brand/LICENSE-brand.txt`). **Never commit font files:** fonts live in [storytold/craft-fonts](https://github.com/storytold/craft-fonts) (rules: `../craftrules/standards/fonts.md`). PhotoCraft uses it through the optional build input `CRAFT_FONTS_DIR=<craft-fonts checkout>` (read by `crates/text/build.rs`, exposed as `photocraft_text::CRAFT_FONTS`; empty without it, and everything must still work). Build with it: `CRAFT_FONTS_DIR="$PWD/../craft-fonts" cargo build`; details in `docs/development.md`› Fonts.
4.**Tests are the gate.** Every change comes with tests. Format crates use round-trip, synthetic-generator, oracle and fuzz tests. Keep the PSD corpus results and the parity floor (`crates/ui-egui/src/parity.rs`) from regressing.
5.**The UI is thin and data-driven.** UI state lives in `ui-egui/src/state.rs` (serde), so the control channel can read and drive it. Colours and radii come from `theme::Tokens`, never hard-coded.
6.**Verify UI changes visually.** Render offscreen with `cargo run -p photocraft-ui-egui --example snapshot` (no window, no focus stealing), or launch with `--control` and take `ui.screenshot`. Look at the PNG. Demo images must be public-domain art, never personal photos. When fetching assets, never put a person's name, email or other personal details in requests (User-Agent, headers, URLs); use a generic `Photocraft-dev` User-Agent.
7.**Never break wasm.** L0–L6 must `cargo check --target wasm32-unknown-unknown` (run `cargo xtask wasm`). File-system code is `cfg(not(target_arch = "wasm32"))` or goes through the platform services.
8.**Performance is a feature.** Benchmark heavy operations on a 24–36 MP image in release. Work per tile in parallel (rayon), skip empty tiles, never scan a full surface per frame (cache per revision), and record before/after timings in the dev log.
9.**Never panic on input** (see *Never crash* above). A command's `run` closure and anything it calls must return `Err`, never panic, for *any* params or document state: validate params, check bounds before indexing or dividing, and reject absurd sizes before allocating. The `panic_hunt` integration test fuzzes every command with adversarial params and must stay green.
3.`cargo xtask parity` → `docs/parity-checklist.md` lists every missing menu item, grouped by menu. Low-hanging fruit is usually a missing command whose algorithm already exists in `algo`, `paint`, `vector` or `text`.
While iterating, run less and keep the full commands above as the final gate: `cargo test -p <crate> --lib --tests` skips the examples and doctests plain `cargo test` builds every time (ui-egui has 11 examples), and `cargo test -p <crate> --test <file>` runs one integration-test file. `cargo nextest run` runs tests in parallel across binaries; see `docs/development.md`› Faster test loops.
**Test corpora.** Real-file corpora live in `corpus/` (gitignored, never committed), fetched at pinned commits and sha256-verified by `cargo xtask corpus --all`: our Photoshop-authored oracles from https://github.com/storytold/photocraft-corpus plus psd-tools, ag-psd and PngSuite from their upstreams. Pins: `xtask/src/corpus_pins.rs`. The corpus tests are opt-in (cargo feature `corpus`): plain `cargo test` skips them, and with the feature on a missing corpus fails ("run `cargo xtask corpus --all`"). `cargo xtask test-corpus` fetches and runs them all. CI always runs them (the `corpus` job, cached by pin). Never commit corpus files; new oracles go to photocraft-corpus (its `AGENTS.md`), then a pin bump here. Details: `docs/development.md`› Test corpora.
Commands must **never panic** on bad input (Rule 9): every `run` closure and the code it calls returns `Err`, not a panic, for any params or document state. New commands come with a graceful-failure test (empty/out-of-range/wrong-type params → `Err`, not a crash).
Then append a terse entry to `log/devlog.md` (what landed, numbers, what's still open). Sessions can end abruptly (crashes, context limits), so the dev log plus a green tree is how the next agent picks up. Keep the tree building at every step.
## 6. Parallel agents
- Use your own target dir (`CARGO_TARGET_DIR=target/agent-<name>`) to avoid the Cargo build lock, and edit only the files you own. Shared files (`engine/src/lib.rs`, the `v.extend(...)` list in `engine/src/commands.rs`, `ui-egui/src/menus.rs`, `state.rs`) get small, surgical edits; re-read before editing.
- Put new commands in a **new module** (`engine/src/<area>_cmds.rs` with a `specs()` function) rather than growing a shared file.
- If someone else's in-progress edit breaks the build, wait and retry; don't fix their files.
- Keep every `Cargo.toml` valid at all times: the `crates/*` glob means one broken manifest breaks everyone's build. **Create or rewrite manifests atomically**: write to a temp file outside `crates/`, then `mv` it into place.
- Disk space: each target dir is about 10 GB. Delete `target/agent-*` dirs of finished agents.
-`../craftrules/release/playbook.md`: how every storytold app builds signed release binaries (the canonical recipe; `docs/release-playbook.md` just points there); `docs/releasing.md` is PhotoCraft's specifics.
