Frames
May 28, 2026 · View on GitHub
A frame is a vantage operator: a system-prompt payload that re-poses the entire problem from a different cognitive position. Not a persona, not a domain expert — a deliberate distortion that forces the generator into a corner it would not naturally drift toward.
15 built-in frames ship today, biased toward engineering when codeMode is on (the default). Each is a vantage prompt plus tags.
| Frame | Vantage | Tags |
|---|---|---|
| Hardware engineer | latency, memory layout, physical constraints | code, wild |
| Regulator / auditor | what must be provable, traceable, refusable? | design, general |
| 10-year-old | ignore convention; the naive, unencumbered approach | general, wild |
| Competitor trying to break it | adversarial; surface ideas by inversion | code, design |
| Biology | immune systems, neural plasticity, cell signaling, gut flora | code, wild |
| Logistics | queues, batching, just-in-time, hub-and-spoke, returns | code, design |
| Game design | loops, rewards, friction, save-states, speedrun tricks | design, general |
| Markets | auctions, futures contracts, clearing houses | design, wild |
| Inversion | ask the opposite question, then negate | code, design, general |
| $0 budget / infinite budget | extremes break anchoring | code, general |
| Remove the load-bearing assumption | what's possible if the framework / DB / network is gone? | code, design, wild |
| Speedrunner | glitches, skips, frame-perfect shortcuts | code, wild |
| Ant colony / swarm | no central planner, local rules, emergent behavior | code, wild |
| 3am on-call | what design would let you not get paged? | code, design |
How frames are selected
codeMode(defaulttrue) biases selection towardcodeanddesigntags.- A
wildframe always gets one reserved slot per run so divergence stays weird. - Selection is deterministic per-seed so runs are reproducible.
Authoring your own
A frame is ~5 lines in src/frames.ts. A good frame passes at least two of:
- Distinct vocabulary — concepts no existing frame uses (pheromone trails, futures contracts, frame-perfect skip).
- Distinct posture — adversarial vs constructive vs naive vs maximalist. Not just a different domain saying the same thing.
- Reproducible distortion — consistently surfaces ideas the other frames don't.
Full guide in CONTRIBUTING.md.