adf-codec/AGENTS.md

Working in this repo

Decisions a reader would otherwise relitigate, and the rules for every collaborator, human or agent. Using the library: README.md. What is still to build: todo.md.

1. Three formats, ADF is the hub

ADF, one markdown flavour, one HTML dialect. Six directions exposed, but markdown↔HTML compose through ADF: four conversions exist to keep correct — never write a fifth. No fourth format, ever; each one doubles the directions.

2. The round-trip is the product

markdownToAdf(adfToMarkdown(doc)) and htmlToAdf(adfToHtml(doc)) must equal doc — anything less silently destroys content an editor could not represent, in a document it did not author. When losslessness and readability conflict, losslessness wins.

The other direction is a canonical fixpoint, not byte-identity: human markdown normalizes, the way back yields the library's canonical spelling, and that spelling round-trips byte-identically.

"Equals" is structural equality over editor-normal ADF — adjacent text nodes with identical marks merged, JSON number semantics, an empty attrs object, marks array or content array the absent key — the only domain markdown can restore.

Round-trip equality is a property tested over a corpus, not a claim made in prose.

3. Unknown input policy

• Unknown ADF node: carried opaquely — raw JSON rides a dedicated syntax in both formats and restores to a deep-equal node. The round-trip holds for documents newer than the library. So does a known node no section spells where it stands: a markdown serializer spells a node by type without checking its position, and refusing loses a document ADF itself keeps in an unsupportedBlock. Where a container's own spelling cannot hold the child it has — a bulletList outside listItem, a codeBlock outside text — the error result names that instead.
• Unmappable foreign HTML element: error result naming the element — never a silent drop.
• Bare @name / :smile: in typed text: stays a text node. Only directives produce mention/emoji/media nodes; resolving names to ids needs I/O, which is the consumer's job.

4. The flavour

• Directives, one grammar for everything markdown lacks: :::panel info … ::: blocks, :mention[@Mikael]{id=5b10a2} inline. Prior art: CommonMark's generic-directives proposal.
• Plain CommonMark is a subset, with carve-outs (spec/flavour.md): literal text shaped like a directive, a pipe table or a ~~ pair is claimed — plus one image gap.
• Tables: one header row plus plain inline cells → pipe table; anything richer → directive form.
• Identity-bearing nodes carry their ids in attributes; a document is only portable within its site — accepted.
• The HTML dialect mirrors this: semantic elements, stable adf-* classes, data-* for what HTML cannot express, text always escaped. No stylesheet ships.

5. Dependencies

dependencies is empty. A runtime dependency enters only through a decision entry here stating why ~20 lines of own code cannot do the job, who maintains it, and what auditing it costs. So the CommonMark and HTML parsers are written in this repo. A table a standard fixes is data rather than a dependency: HTML5's 2125 semicolon-terminated character references ship packed in their own module, so entity decoding is complete without one. devDependencies: few, each earning its keep; they never reach a consumer.

6. The package contract

• ESM only — no CommonJS build, no dual-package hazard.
• One entrypoint: built JavaScript, .d.ts beside it. Do not add a TypeScript-source entrypoint — Node refuses to type-strip under node_modules (ERR_UNSUPPORTED_NODE_MODULES_TYPE_STRIPPING), so it cannot serve an npm consumer.
• Published to public npmjs as @larvit/atlassian-adf-converter. Public source: the Gitea repo goes public, LICENSE in place, before the first publish.
• Exact versions: save-exact=true in .npmrc.

7. Nothing about any consumer

No Jira client, no HTTP, no REST shapes, no issue keys, no actual consumer named anywhere. Design against the README's personas.

8. Semver: the formats are API

The emitted markdown and HTML are contracts. After 1.0: previously-emitted output parsing differently, or not at all, is MAJOR; new syntax while old output still round-trips is MINOR. Pre-1.0, normal 0.x rules.

The error surface is a contract too. ConvertError is { code, message, path } — the code from a closed list a consumer may switch exhaustively, the message free text, the path the node's position from the document root. Adding, removing or renaming a code is breaking, so a milestone meeting a new failure cause reuses a code where one fits; the list is complete at 0.1.0. A code names the cause; where one cause recurs across node types or across directions, one code covers them all and path and message say which — unsupported-nesting-depth is the 500-level guard whichever direction hits it. A claim code names the spelling claimed, never the node that spelling would have built: a malformed :::table is a malformed-directive. A cause the carry answers gets no code: a mark no spelling writes rides the carry with its node.

9. Release automation

• package.json version on main is the source of truth. CI on main: tests green and version differs from npm → publish and tag vX.Y.Z. No bump, no deploy; the bump is each shipping PR's deliberate semver judgment.
• Renovate watches devDependencies, Docker pins and action tags; automerges everything on green CI.
• Docker images pin the full patch version (node:24.19.0-alpine3.24, never node:24); actions pin semver tags.

10. Tests first, in Docker

Test for the behaviour wanted first, then implement until green. node --test, beside the code. Node, tsc and npm never run on the host — only via the pinned images (§9). Tests are independent, coverage does not decline, containers are torn down after a run.

The floors live in the test script, so npm test and the gate are one path: 100% of lines and functions, and a branch floor that only ever moves upward. It sits below 100 because the guards noUncheckedIndexedAccess and ADF's optional keys force — ?? [], ?? {}, ?., an index compared against undefined — have a half no valid document reaches.

The corpus, all checked in: hand-built fixtures per node and combination; real sanitized ADF from live Atlassian APIs; property-generated ADF trees; the CommonMark spec suite against markdownToAdf and markdownToHtml.

11. Code rules

• Two-space indent, strict TypeScript, English everywhere. Alphabetical order wherever order carries no meaning.
• Failures are values: everything returns Result<T> — { ok: true; value } | { ok: false; error: ConvertError } — nothing throws. try/catch only wrapped tightly around a call that genuinely throws, converted to a result on the spot.
• Only the hard break's inline segment holds a raw newline — every other spelling escapes one or refuses it — which is how the whitespace carry finds a line edge.
• Emphasis is spelled against CommonMark's matching, never flanking alone: a delimiter run in text escapes wherever CommonMark could open or close with it, leaving the emitter's own delimiters the only ones in play, and a pair that matching hands to another delimiter rides the carry instead. matchEmphasis transcribes the reference process_emphasis line for line, and its closer walk and opener search stay whole: broken into named steps they drift from the algorithm being faithful is the whole point of.
• A readable spelling tried ahead of a general one — a CommonMark block, the image, the pipe table, a pipe cell — gives way with undefined for every shape it cannot spell, and fails only where the general form fails on the same node. Refusing there refuses a document the general form spells, so a refusal the general form does not share belongs in the general form or nowhere — save the nested list a tight spelling would swallow, whose refusal the tight-versus-blank answer owns (todo.md 2b).
• Nothing recurses unbounded: the guards walk iteratively, and blocks, marks and JSON values — an attribute's and a carried node's alike — are all held to 500 levels, so a deep document is a Result rather than the stack overflow that waits near 2000.
• No casts: as, as unknown as, non-null !. A boundary owes a type guard validating the fields it claims (isAdfDocument); past it everything is typed. Make invalid states unrepresentable.
• src/adf/ holds ADF's own knowledge and imports no format. Each format directory (markdown/, html/) parts into emit/ (ADF→format) and parse/ (format→ADF), its root holding what both directions read. A construct's reader lives in that root beside the regex the emitter escapes against, so the two cannot drift; a reader with no emit counterpart goes in parse/. A rule both directions must answer alike — whether a list marker interrupts a paragraph — is one function there too, never a copy per direction, however conservative the copy would be.
• The attribute vocabulary is ADF's: adf/ walks it and narrows each value to its kind, and a format spells the narrowed value. A spelling that re-checks the type is the check's second copy.
• Explicit over implicit; descriptive names; no catch-all files (utils, helpers, misc); a file does not repeat its directory in its name — adf/document.ts, never adf/adf-document.ts.
• Reuse before adding; the smallest sufficient diff is the benchmark; no speculative generality — a second consumer, or it goes.

12. Prose to a minimum

Applies everywhere: comments, every markdown file in this repo (this one included), PR text.

• Default is no comment. One earns its single line only by naming an invariant, footgun or external constraint the code cannot show — never restatement, history, absence or arrangement. A second line belongs in the commit message or a decision entry here.
• Every prose comment in a diff is a review question; the default answer is delete.
• A doc paragraph says what the repo cannot say for itself, or it goes. The fix for a redundant one is deletion, not trimming. A false claim in any doc is a bug, fixed where found.
• Published text — npm README, error messages, API docs — never references internal systems, tickets or repos.

13. Commits and PRs

One-line commit messages and PR titles; short PR summaries. No AI-attribution markers, ever.

14. Non-goals

No wiki markup (§1), no network or filesystem I/O, no name→id resolution (§3), no ADF schema validation or exported validator — a refusal that keeps the round-trip is not schema validation, so the one a spelled node carrying the same mark type twice earns stays, no shipped CSS (§4), no streaming APIs, no performance budget — real documents are kilobytes. A CLI is a later goal (todo.md), not a non-goal.

15. The working loop

One unchecked todo.md item per session, in the smallest PR-able chunk — split a big milestone into sub-items in todo.md before starting it. A chunk running a little over or under that is not worth deliberating; what matters is that nothing is left undone in the end. Per chunk:

1. Fresh worktree off updated origin/main; implement tests-first (§10).
2. Run the larv-review flow until it passes and CI is green. A reviewer launch states the latest gate result (commit and outcome); a reviewer does not re-run ci.sh or the tests when a result exists for the commit under review, or when the diff since that result cannot affect it (docs-only) — re-run only what its own findings or fixes invalidate.
3. Merge the PR (standing authorization, this repo only, granted through the 0.1.0 release — PR #3), check the box in todo.md, report, stop. The next chunk gets a fresh session.

Ask, don't guess: any choice where what the maintainer would pick is not near-certain gets asked, and the answer lands as a decision in this file. The confidence bar is very high — asking too often is the accepted cost, guessing wrong is not.

Reserved for the maintainer, never the agent: changing version in package.json (a bump on main publishes, §9 — every release including 0.1.0 is the maintainer's), making the repo public, and creating the NPM_TOKEN secret.

A continuous loop session (/loop) counts as a chain of sessions: one chunk per iteration, each iteration starting by re-reading AGENTS.md and todo.md and trusting them over anything remembered from earlier iterations. The loop session is a thin driver: each chunk's work runs in a fresh-context subagent holding this file as its charter, and the driver only relays maintainer questions, runs the review flow, merges, and cleans up. The loop stops when only maintainer-reserved acts remain.