Headbox

One instruction layer · Every AI agent

Write your project's rules once. Claude, Codex, Gemini, Cursor, Copilot and Windsurf all follow the same ones, instead of six files drifting apart. Then watch it work.

Press start

The Stack

Headbox is usually described as a CLI. The CLI is its strongest surface, but the product is four layers: a rules layer that governs the workspace, the CLI that operates it, a Console that gives it a face, and Live, which lets you watch it work. All four ship today. Pick one.

What this gallery is, and how it stays true

Nothing here is hand-transcribed. The terminal frames are generated by executing the real CLI at build time. Command signatures, plugin registry rows, artifact access rules and vendor targets are parsed from the shipped source. If the code changes, the next build changes with it. a hand-copied gallery drifts silently, and this one structurally cannot.

The arcade skin is the site's; the product's look is the product's. Console components are reproduced inside a .product scope carrying the Console's own tokens verbatim, so a card here looks like the app rather than like this page. Everything inside a screen is product; the cabinet around it is staging.

Demo data throughout. The Console runs against real conversations and real project names, so nothing here is a screenshot of it. Names, paths and threads are invented; structure and tokens are real.

8
Surfaces
154
Components
23
Commands
24
Plugins
62
Console UI
25
Roadmap items

Stage Select

The eight terminal surfaces you actually land on. Each frame is verbatim stdout, generated by running cli/headbox.js at build time, so the output on screen cannot drift from the binary. Names and paths inside are demo data.

Where The Code And The Docs Disagree

Rendering the product beside its documentation is an unusually good way to find where the two quietly drifted apart. These turned up. In each case the site shows what the code does, and says so, rather than silently picking a side.

🛰️
Seven vendors documented, six implemented Doc drift
The README lists Antigravity as a supported agent. The string does not appear anywhere in the CLI, and the installer ships six vendor candidates. Compounding it: all 24 plugin headers claim antigravity ✅ compatibility, three sources asserting support the installer does not have.
README.md vs cli/headbox.js: vendorFiles()
🖥️
The roadmap calls the UI "planned". It is running. Stale roadmap
The roadmap still lists the desktop companion and the Headbox UI as unstarted: project list, proposal inbox, team roster, settings editor, artifact editor. All five exist in the Console today as sections of a dashboard you can open right now. The roadmap has not caught up with its own product.
HEADBOX-ROADMAP.md v4 🔲 vs the shipped Console dashboard
🔢
The CLI reports two different versions Shipped quirk
The binary is v0.8.0, but headbox status prints the spec version under a label that reads like the product's. Reproduced exactly as shipped in surface 02: the product's behaviour, not a gallery bug.
cli/headbox.js. Status prints result.versions.spec
📦
The advertised install command does not work yet Not published
The README's Quick Start opens with npx get-headbox init, but publishing to npm is still an unticked roadmap item. Today you run the CLI from a clone.
README.md Quick Start vs HEADBOX-ROADMAP.md: npm publish 🔲
🎯
Three of Live's six signal statuses are invisible Dead styles
Every status lands in the DOM as a class, but only active, parked and dismissed are styled. suggested, confirmed and split render identically. The gallery shows four distinct signal variants, not six. Showing six would invent three.
Headbox Console · .headbox-live-signal
🍴
The recovery page forks the design tokens Drift risk
Recovery redefines the tokens instead of sharing them: same backgrounds and radii, a different accent set, no theme support. It will drift from the Console the first time a token changes.
Headbox Console · public/recovery.html:14-39