Assembly Line Documentation

Assembly Line ships its authoring guidance with the CLI. Codex and Claude Code can therefore use documentation that matches the installed framework version, even when the hosted site has moved ahead.

The integration has four layers:

AGENTS.md or CLAUDE.md contains a short routing rule.
A project-scoped assembly-line-authoring skill loads only for Assembly Line work.
assembly-line docs search finds the relevant page in the installed documentation corpus.
assembly-line docs read loads that page or one section. assembly-line validate --json returns structured issues, suggested fixes, and documentation links.

This is deliberate progressive disclosure. A coding agent does not need the full manual in its standing context.

Set Up A Repository

Give Codex or Claude Code this one line:

Run `npx @assemblyline-agents/sdk@latest setup` in this repository. Set up Assembly Line only; do not create an agent.

setup is safe to run before the user has designed an agent. It:

Creates a minimal private package.json only when the repository has none.
Detects npm, pnpm, or Yarn and pins the current @assemblyline-agents/sdk version.
Installs the project-scoped authoring skill and routing instructions for both Codex and Claude Code.
Reports the bundled documentation revision and stops without creating an agent.

Pass a repository path when it is not the current directory, or override package-manager detection when necessary:

npx @assemblyline-agents/sdk@latest setup ./my-project --pm pnpm

The resulting repository is ready for future agent work. The coding agent must not run assembly-line init, create agent files, or choose providers until the user asks.

Manage The Authoring Integration

setup performs the normal shared-repository installation. To manage the bundled guidance directly after the SDK is installed, run:

assembly-line authoring install all .

Use codex or claude instead of all to install one integration. The command creates these project-scoped files:

AGENTS.md
CLAUDE.md
.agents/skills/assembly-line-authoring/
.claude/skills/assembly-line-authoring/

Codex reads the shared skill from .agents/skills. Claude Code reads its copy from .claude/skills, while CLAUDE.md imports the shared AGENTS.md routing rules. The installer adds small managed blocks to existing instruction files and leaves unrelated content unchanged.

assembly-line init <agentRoot> installs the same guidance inside every new agent folder. That is sufficient when the coding-agent session starts from the agent folder. Install at the repository root as shown above when the session owns multiple agents or starts from a parent directory.

An existing skill or managed routing block is not overwritten by install. After upgrading the Assembly Line CLI, refresh the managed files explicitly:

assembly-line authoring update all .
assembly-line authoring status all . --json

Commit these files when every contributor and CI coding agent should receive the same authoring behavior.

For personal sessions outside a prepared repository, the API-light routing skill can still be installed globally:

npx skills add jasonbadeaux/assembly-line --skill assembly-line-authoring -g -y

That skill routes the coding agent back through setup when the project-local SDK is absent and otherwise uses the installed CLI's version-matched docs.

Start A New Agent With A Coding Agent

Ask Codex or Claude Code to build an Assembly Line agent in plain language. The authoring skill makes it establish the purpose, first success case, ingress, external systems, approval boundaries, data constraints, and explicit provider choices before it adds optional files. It then builds the smallest end-to-end slice and uses the validation loop below.

For example:

Build an Assembly Line agent that receives support requests in Slack, looks up
orders, and drafts refunds. Require approval before any refund is issued.

The coding agent should preserve decisions already present in the request and ask only for missing information that changes the implementation.

Use Version-Matched Documentation

The default commands read the corpus bundled with the installed CLI:

assembly-line docs version
assembly-line docs list
assembly-line docs search "approval gated tool"
assembly-line docs read agent-stack/tools
assembly-line docs read agent-stack/tools#conventions

Add --json when another program will consume the result. Search returns a small ranked catalog with snippets. Read then retrieves one page or one section.

Use hosted documentation only when the task is explicitly about current behavior or an upgrade:

assembly-line docs search "current deploy providers" --latest --json

The --latest flag fetches the hosted corpus. It is never the default because new documentation may describe APIs that the installed packages do not yet provide.

Optional MCP Access

The same local corpus is available as a read-only stdio MCP server:

assembly-line docs mcp

It exposes three tools:

assembly_line_docs_search
assembly_line_docs_read
assembly_line_docs_list

Configure either coding agent to start that command when you want native MCP tool discovery. For example, a project-scoped Codex .codex/config.toml entry can use:

[mcp_servers.assembly_line_docs]
command = "assembly-line"
args = ["docs", "mcp"]

A project-scoped Claude Code .mcp.json entry can use:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "assembly-line-docs": {
      "command": "assembly-line",
      "args": ["docs", "mcp"]
    }
  }
}

If the binary is not globally available, replace assembly-line with the project's package-manager command. The hosted site also exposes a read-only Streamable HTTP endpoint at https://assemblyline.artificialillumination.co/mcp. That endpoint follows the current hosted docs; prefer the local server while editing a project pinned to an older framework version.

Machine-Readable Hosted Surfaces

The hosted documentation publishes:

/llms.txt for a compact page catalog.
/api/agent-docs for the versioned JSON corpus used by --latest.
/mcp for on-demand search, read, and list tools.

These surfaces are generated from the same Markdown under docs/developers/. There is no separate agent-only manual to drift out of date.

Validation Loop

Ask coding agents to finish every material agent change with:

assembly-line validate ./agent --json
assembly-line build ./agent
assembly-line eval ./agent --json

The JSON validation report identifies the installed docs revision and attaches a focused documentation page to each issue. Build and eval remain separate so projects can choose the appropriate cost and confidence level for each change.

Coding Agents