mantle

⚠️ Experimental — co-built with AI

mantle is co-developed with AI coding agents (Claude Code) and is currently in 0.0.x / pre-1.0. Treat everything here as experimental: APIs, manifests, schema shapes, and runtime behavior can break between any two commits without notice or migration path. Do not deploy this for anything you cannot afford to rebuild from scratch.

Review the code, run your own tests, and verify generated content before trusting it. Pull requests welcome; bug reports especially welcome.

Build your content model by prompting, not configuring.

Agent-native headless CMS where AI agents are first-class authors — locked-grammar manifests, structured JSON diagnostics, and static .md mirrors every agent can crawl without auth. Most CMSes treat AI as a content editor; mantle treats it as the developer.

Try it cold

If a user hands you this repo and says "let's try Mantle" or "what can we build?", read skills/install/SKILL.md. Pick the closest blank, presence, intake, publication, transaction, reservation, or community bundle from aotter/mantle-starters, materialize it into a new local project, then install, validate, typecheck, and start the preview. Do not use this SDK checkout as the application.

Mantle landing runs the same starter-bundle flow and continues through private GitHub repo creation, Cloudflare deployment, and optional paid hosted auth. Local cold start stops before those provider operations.

Generated projects include the mantle authoring CLI from @aotter/mantle: generate, skills, update, validate, introspect, emit-openapi, and emit-types. generate compiles YAML into .mantle/generated/site.ts and types.d.ts; --check verifies freshness without writing. The umbrella package also ships mantle-harness for crowded SQLite index coverage and live Worker/API/page sampling; see docs/performance-harness.md.

Prerelease. This repo is a clean rebuild of the v0.0.x POC. Until v0.1.0 tags, the API surface is in flux — alpha and beta releases may introduce breaking changes. Current published versions and channel policy are documented in docs/release-process.md. Track the rebuild plan at #1.

Part of Mantle

Mantle (Config Language for Apps & Modeling) is Aotter's family of agent-native config languages. Two halves, one thesis:

• Apps (OLTP) — mantle (this repo) and future apps. Build a content-driven web service by declaring atoms in YAML; the runtime ships dispatcher + auth + render + MCP for free.
• Modeling (OLAP) — aotter-mantle (sibling project). Turn enterprise Excel/CSV files into Kimball-modeled DuckLake warehouses by declaring star-schema configs in YAML.

Note: the two halves intentionally live as separate repos under the aotter org — different release cadences, different licensing posture.