face-cli

A simulated face rendered in the browser that appears three-dimensional on a flat 2D screen and can look in any direction — an agent-drivable gaze surface for robots, kiosks, and screens.

Status: scaffold. The renderer does not exist yet. What ships today is the agent-first CLI baseline, the mesh identity, and CI. The face itself is being designed in the open — see the build brief and CLAUDE.md.

The idea

Two halves, and both are the interesting part: the illusion of depth on a flat surface, and a gaze that can be pointed anywhere and reads as pointed there. Everything else is in service of those.

face-cli is the expressive output side of a face. Its sibling face-recognition-cli is the perceptual input side — it identifies real people from camera frames. They share a subject and nothing else.

Decided so far

• The render target is the browser — a local page driven over canvas/WebGL/SVG. It needs no display server (so it runs on a headless robot box), the screen showing the face need not be the machine running the process, and a page can be screenshotted and diffed in CI. The technique within the browser is still open.
• The rendered face must survive face recognition. Not photorealism — a detector-passing bar: OpenCV YuNet should detect it above the standard 0.6 score threshold, and SFace's 128-dim embedding should stay stable across the whole gaze range. That turns "it looks 3D" into an assertion CI can actually make, and it is the seam along which this repo composes with face-recognition-cli.

Open questions — the gaze primitive, the control channel between a one-shot CLI call and a live page, whether expression is in scope, one face or many — are tracked in CLAUDE.md and the brief.

Quickstart

uv sync
uv run pytest -n auto                 # run the test suite
uv run face whoami                    # identity from culture.yaml
uv run face learn                     # self-teaching prompt (add --json)
uv run teken cli doctor . --strict    # the agent-first rubric gate CI runs

The console command is face; the import package is face_cli and the PyPI distribution is face-cli. The mismatch is deliberate — a bare face is already a published distribution on PyPI, so squatting that import would shadow it.

CLI

Verb	What it does
whoami	Report this agent's nick, version, backend, and model from culture.yaml.
learn	Print a structured self-teaching prompt.
explain <path>	Markdown docs for any noun/verb path.
overview	Read-only descriptive snapshot of the agent.
doctor	Check the agent-identity invariants (prompt-file-present, backend-consistency).
cli overview	Describe the CLI surface itself.

Every command supports --json. Results go to stdout, errors/diagnostics to stderr (never mixed). Exit codes: 0 success, 1 user error, 2 environment error, 3+ reserved.

No gaze or render verbs exist yet — the list above is the scaffold's introspection surface.

What's in the box

• An agent-first CLI cited from teken (afi-cli) — the runtime package has no third-party dependencies.
• A mesh identity — culture.yaml (suffix + backend) and the matching resident prompt file (AGENTS.colleague.md, since this agent runs backend: colleague).
• The canonical guildmaster skill kit under .claude/skills/, vendored cite-don't-import. See docs/skill-sources.md.
• A build + deploy baseline — pytest, lint, the agent-first rubric gate, and PyPI Trusted Publishing wired into GitHub Actions.

Contributing

Every PR bumps the version (version-check CI blocks merge otherwise) and adds a real CHANGELOG entry. See CLAUDE.md for the full conventions — the cicd PR lane, worktree layout, and deploy setup.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.