media-cli

Agent and CLI for the local media I/O device plane — one inventory, one stable identity scheme, and one routing surface across the media hardware attached to a machine: speakers and audio sinks, optional standalone inputs, and (by composing webcam-cli, not reimplementing it) cameras and microphones.

It answers "what media hardware is on this machine, what can each piece actually do, which one should I use, and who is holding it right now?" — device selection, routing, playback and recording. It does not interpret what is captured or played: what a frame contains is a vision model's job, and what to play belongs to harmonics-cli and TTS engines.

Status: scaffold

The domain is not implemented yet. What ships today is the agent-first CLI skeleton — six introspection verbs, the error/output contract, CI, and PyPI publishing. media_cli/ contains no device code.

The build brief, including the host survey it is derived from and the open questions that block design, is issue #1. CLAUDE.md carries the working notes: verified device-plane constraints, the architecture of the CLI skeleton, and the conventions.

Why a device plane

Surveyed on a real Linux workstation, the problem is not "call aplay":

• Indices are not identity, at any layer. /dev/videoN and ALSA card numbers are plug-order and have been observed swapping between two cameras with no hardware change; PipeWire object IDs churn faster still. "capture from device 0" is not a reproducible instruction.
• The subsystems disagree about what exists. Raw ALSA lists five playback entries where PipeWire has two usable sinks (four HDMI entries are one physical output), and lists a microphone that PipeWire does not expose at all.
• Formats are device-native and incompatible. One sink is 16 kHz, another 48 kHz. "Play this WAV" silently means resample-or-fail.
• Access can be granted by a login seat rather than a group, so a device that works from a desktop session is unopenable from a headless agent or container — and the diagnosis differs between video and audio.

Capture and playback are already spoken for in the mesh. The plane underneath them is not, and that is where these problems live.

Quickstart

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

The console command is media. The distribution and import package are media-cli and media_cli — deliberately distinct, so installing this does not squat a generic media module in a consumer's environment.

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 and diagnostics to stderr (never mixed). Exit codes: 0 success, 1 user error, 2 environment error, 3+ reserved.

Write verbs — none yet — are dry-run by default and require --apply. For this agent that is a safety property, not a convention: playback and device reconfiguration are physically observable side effects, and a speculative call from an agent loop must not make noise in a room.

Install

uv tool install media-cli

Development

See CLAUDE.md for the full conventions — the version-bump-every-PR rule, the cicd PR lane, lint commands, and the rubric gate. Skill provenance and the re-sync procedure are in docs/skill-sources.md.

License

Apache 2.0 — see LICENSE.