One generation in. Registered frames out.

• 11CLI subcommands in farmer/cli.py
• 4image providers; 1 exercised live end-to-end
• 2runtime dependencies: pillow, numpy
• 13/13test files pass with no AI calls (~8 s)
• 6assets committed to the in-repo registries
• 0pixels different outside a state's change region

Walking the trunk

1. 01

   Choreograph

   farmer/choreograph.py

   An action word becomes one explicit pose line per cell. Eight template functions cover idle breathing, gesture presenting, stamp letter, wave and the four object presets; _resample() spreads a six-phase list across whatever frame count you asked for. Anything else is the agent's job — pass a JSON list of exactly N strings via --script.

   Locomotion is rejected here on purpose. LOCOMOTION_WORDS (choreograph.py:16) holds thirteen words; if the action intersects that set and no explicit script was given, run_strip() raises before a single image is generated.

   Stage 01 in full →

2. 02

   Anchor sheet

   farmer/grids.py

   The accepted master frame is tiled into every cell of the grid at one fixed scale and one fixed foot line, on flat #FF00FF. The generator is then only asked to change the pose. Grid choice is table-driven and never a single row — _GRIDS maps 4 → 2×2, 6 → 2×3, 9 → 3×3, up to 16 → 4×4.

   Sheet geometry →

3. 03

   Prompt

   farmer/prompts.py

   Four builders, one shape: subject, style, reference notes, the numbered per-cell list, then a strict-rules block that spells out the magenta contract — no bloom on the background, no cell borders, nothing crossing a cell edge, subject inside the central 70% safe area. Unused cells are padded with EXACT repeat of frame 1's pose (loop-return filler frame) so no cell is ever left empty.

   The invariants →

4. 04

   Generate

   farmer/providers/

   One image call per action. Providers declare capabilities, are constructed fail-fast — a missing dispatch script or unset API key raises ProviderUnavailable from the constructor — and every one of them re-opens and PIL-verifies the file it produced rather than trusting a printed path.

   Provider matrix →

5. 05

   Despill

   farmer/despill.py

   Four passes: a hard colour-distance cut, a Chebyshev depth map out of the keyed region, a soft-alpha unmix that solves observed = (1-k)·subject + k·key so antialiased coverage survives as partial alpha, then a trapped-spill correction that fixes colour without touching alpha. An adaptive retry handles emissive halos, and refuses to run when the subject is genuinely magenta.

   Stage 02 in full →

6. 06

   Slice

   farmer/slice.py

   Frames are recovered as connected components, not by cutting on grid lines. The declared count must come back or SliceError is raised with every component's area and bbox in the message. Grid cutting exists as --slice-mode grid, an explicit opt-in, never an automatic fallback.

   Stage 03 in full →

7. 07

   Align

   farmer/align.py

   Each frame is shifted to maximise alpha overlap with frame 0 — but only the upper 65% votes, so a raised arm cannot drag the body. The union bounding box becomes a canvas lock shared by every action of that character; if a later action needs a bigger box, earlier actions are re-cropped from their stored working canvases.

   Registration →

8. 08

   Validate

   farmer/qa.py

   Three booleans decide pass: frame count recovered, maximum anchor jitter ≤ 3 px, total residual key pixels ≤ 400. Torso motion is recorded but not gated — it contains the choreography you asked for. The contact sheet ships an onion-skin panel next to the frames so drift is visible at a glance.

   Stage 06 in full →

9. 09

   Pack

   farmer/pack.py

   Per-frame PNGs, a near-square atlas, a manifest with absolute rects and fps, a GIF preview and a dependency-free review.html. Packing refuses non-uniform frame sizes outright — pack requires canvas-locked frames.

   Packing →

Where the line forks

Three commands leave the trunk. Two of them reuse its organs; one refuses to use it at all.

• is_locomotion(action) → brief.py

  Walk, run, jog, sprint, stride, crawl, climb, swim, fly. Grid sheets were found to fail for these, so farmer brief writes a start frame plus an image-to-video prompt and stops. No API call, no pretence.

• farmer state → states.py

  A registered object gets a semantic state generated in all four cells at once, then the anchor's pixels are pasted back everywhere outside the change region and the result is verified bit-for-bit.

• farmer environment / scenevar → layers.py, scenes.py

  Scene plates never touch chroma keying. Planes are cut from bboxes, holes are inpainted by iterative neighbour-mean fill, and a night variant is decomposed into reusable multiply and screen maps.

The command surface

Eleven subcommands, one argparse parser, built in farmer/cli.py:175–299. The module docstring at the top of that file is what --help prints:

$ python3 -m farmer --help
usage: farmer [-h]
              {character,object,environment,adopt,state,transition,scenevar,apply-curation,selfcheck,cutout,brief}
              ...

assetfarmer CLI.

Subcommands:
  character    grid-sheet animation pipeline for a character action
  object       same pipeline with 2-4 frame loop presets (flicker/pulse/sway/steam)
  environment  cut a plate into parallax planes + inpainted base
  cutout       single frame: (generate ->) despill -> RGBA PNG
  brief        emit a Dreamina/Seedance i2v handoff for locomotion
  adopt        migrate pipeline output into the characters/objects/scenes registry
  state        generate a semantic state for a registered object (composite-back)
  transition   generate an endpoint-locked transition strip between two states
  scenevar     generate a scene variant plate + extract its lighting overlay
  apply-curation  drop review-rejected frames from a run and repack
  selfcheck    run the deterministic test suite (tests/run_tests.py)

options:
  -h, --help            show this help message and exit

What is built, and what is only declared

Accuracy about maturity matters more than a feature list. Everything below was read out of the tree, not out of the README.