AGENTS.md

Guide for agents and humans working on the Rendobar MCP server. Companion to the monorepo guide at rendobar/rendobar. Dev rules, build/test commands, and the MCP-specific hard bans live in CLAUDE.md — read it before changing code.

TL;DR

• What this is: the local stdio Model Context Protocol server for Rendobar. Single ESM bundle, ~6 tools, public, MIT.
• SDK source: lives in the rendobar/rendobar monorepo under packages/sdk/. Consumed here as @rendobar/sdk from npm.
• Release: conventional commits → release-please → npm publish with provenance + .mcpb GitHub Release asset + official MCP registry.
• No manual tags, no manual version bumps. release-please owns them.

The rules that bite (full detail in CLAUDE.md)

• Never write to stdout. It is reserved for JSON-RPC framing; one stray byte kills the connection. Logs go to stderr.
• Recoverable tool failures return { isError: true }, not throws. Throw only for programmer bugs.
• Cold-start budget < 2 s, bundle < 100 KB. CI asserts both. No network calls at module load.
• One Zod version. The SDK uses zod/v4; two copies break registerTool. Fix the dep tree, never as any.

Cross-repo brand consistency

This repo is part of the broader Rendobar platform. The canonical reference for brand strings, URLs, and metadata across every rendobar repo is the apex monorepo's .claude/rules/brand-consistency.md:

https://github.com/rendobar/rendobar/blob/main/.claude/rules/brand-consistency.md

Canonical brand strings (must match apex)

Field	Value
Display name	Rendobar
Slogan	Media processing API for developers and agents
Apex URL	https://rendobar.com
Apex page URLs	https://rendobar.com/<path>/ (always trailing slash)
API URL	https://api.rendobar.com
Dashboard URL	https://app.rendobar.com
CDN URL	https://cdn.rendobar.com
Twitter handle	@rendobar
Discord	https://discord.gg/kAGqjBzx8N

Forbidden variants: Rendobar.com, rendobar (lowercase except in URLs / package names), https://www.rendobar.com, http://rendobar.com, apex page links without a trailing slash.

Entity model: Rendobar is a media-processing platform. The FFmpeg API is one product on it. Write "Rendobar's FFmpeg API", never "Rendobar is an FFmpeg API".

Writing style (README, package.json description, docs prose)

No em-dash (—) and no semicolons in reader-facing prose. They read as AI-generated. Use a period or a comma. Sentence case, declarative, specific numbers over vague claims. Code blocks are exempt.

No AI attribution in commits / PRs

Never add Co-Authored-By: Claude, 🤖 Generated with [Claude Code], or any AI attribution in commit messages or PR descriptions. Strip them silently if a template injects them.

For agents

1. Confirm the build and tests are green before touching anything (commands in CLAUDE.md).
2. Branch off main: git checkout -b feat/short-name.
3. Make the change plus a test.
4. Commit with a conventional message. Never use git commit --no-verify — fix the hook failure instead.
5. git push -u origin <branch> and open a PR. Wait for CI green, merge.
6. Walk away. release-please handles the version, tag, npm publish, and registry.

Do not: push to main directly, push tags manually, edit CHANGELOG.md or the version field, or add AI attribution to commits.