Quirework

Examples

Two projects in Quirework’s repository consume it the way yours would: a sample book and a sample site. Both are test fixtures, not showcases. AI wrote them, and no person edited or reviewed their prose, so read them for the structure the tool keeps, not for the writing.

Side Quest

Side Quest is a short comic memoir by Cy Dequest, a documentation engineer who builds Quirework instead of finishing Full Stop, a natural history of punctuation. It is a preface and nine chapters, about seven thousand words, with a spec of what it commits to and a trail of how each commitment got there.

Everything in it is fiction, its author included. Cy Dequest, Cy’s manager, editor and colleagues, and the book Cy never finished do not exist, and none of it is an account of how Quirework was made. An AI played Cy, writing every one of Cy’s messages from a brief, and drove an AI companion that did the work. No person edited or reviewed its prose. So the book demonstrates the method and nothing more: read it for what the tool kept, not for the writing. Its provenance metrics, which measure what the human contributed against what the machine did, measure one model against another.

The problem it is about

The book’s premise is the problem Quirework exists for. The narrator’s unfinished book, a history of punctuation, credited one print shop with a habit in chapter four and a rival shop with the same habit in chapter nine. Fixing either chapter broke the other, and every fix needed a footnote in the other chapter, until the footnotes cited footnotes.

A claim, 'The dash is given its first printed rule', dated 1694, above five sentences from five chapters. Three of them say 1684 and are marked as disagreeing; two say 1694 and agree.
The book’s one figure, from its chapter called The Demo: a claim, and the five sentences in five chapters that state it. Three disagree.

One commitment, followed through the book

One of the book’s commitments says where the tool’s name came from. The invented author first told the story one way, then found a page that proved it wrong, and corrected it. The spec changed, every document that carries the commitment was listed, and an independent review checked the change against all of them.

One commitment and the four places that carry it A section of Side Quest's spec, "The name came from quire", is joined to the four documents that bind it: the book's chapter, the poems, the six-pager and the young readers' edition. The young readers' edition is circled: after the author corrected the story, it defined the word quire, where its own notes say to show it. The spec The name came from “quire” {#the-name} Where it is carried The book Chapter 5, The Name The poems The Name, in anapestic couplets The six-pager One memo, in the part about Otto The young readers’ edition The Name, for readers of about ten Defines “quire”, where its notes say to show it. Found by an independent consistency review.
One commitment and the four places that carry it A section of Side Quest's spec, "The name came from quire", is joined to the four documents that bind it: the book's chapter, the poems, the six-pager and the young readers' edition. The young readers' edition is circled: after the author corrected the story, it defined the word quire, where its own notes say to show it. The spec The name came from “quire” {#the-name} Where it is carried The book Chapter 5, The Name The poems The Name, in anapestic couplets The six-pager One memo, in the part about Otto The young readers’ edition The Name, for readers of about ten Defines “quire”, where its notes say to show it. Found by an independent consistency review.
The commitment and the four documents that carry it. The review found that the young readers’ edition now defined a word its notes say to show. The circle marks that finding.
The trail of one commitment Six breadcrumbs from three sessions, oldest first, under the spec section "The name came from quire". A seed: Otto completed quirk as quirework. A correction: the author cuts a drafted line on who named the tool. A sharpening: the evening of names and the first commit. A reversal: the page of names ends on quire, and Otto only finished the word. Two more sharpenings: the chapter admits the mistake once, and the admission is quoted word for word in the spec. The name came from “quire” {#the-name} 6 breadcrumbs, 3 sessions seed Otto completed “quirk” as quirework correct Cuts a drafted line on who named the tool sharpen The evening of names, and the first commit reverse The page of names ends on “quire”; Otto only finished it sharpen The chapter admits the mistake, once sharpen The admission, quoted word for word in the spec turn 3 turn 4 turn 1 turn 1 turn 2 turn 3 session 1b7ad009 26d889c8 session c137540e
The commitment’s trail. The author first told the story with Otto, the AI assistant in the book, naming the tool. A page of names found later showed that the word was the author’s own. The reversal sits on the trail, after what it reversed.

One spec, four formats, three editions

quirework publish build renders the book to HTML, PDF, EPUB and Word, then renders each derived edition the same way. Every edition answers to the same spec. Each edition’s notes bind or omit, with a reason, every commitment the book makes.

Chapter 5 of Side Quest, The Name, in the HTML edition.
The book’s fifth chapter, in the HTML edition.
Chapter 5 of Side Quest in the PDF, under a boxed chapter heading.
The same chapter in the PDF, set by Typst.
Chapter 5 of Side Quest retold as rhyming verse.
The poems: one per chapter, drafted on a different model from the other editions.
Chapter 5 of Side Quest in the young readers' edition.
The young readers’ edition, for readers of about ten who read well and alone.
The first page of the six-pager, a memo that opens with the heading How's the Book?
The six-pager: the whole book as one memo to the narrator’s manager.

The build checks what goes wrong silently. A figure must have the same number in every format. The EPUB must pass the W3C checker, pinned by version and checksum. A grayscale set of figures is made for e-ink, where color turns to mud. The render refuses to go on in a substituted typeface.

Read it

Each edition is rendered from the book’s source every time this site is published, by the same quirework publish build an author runs. Every page carries a notice that the book is a test fixture whose prose no person reviewed, and every download carries the book’s own note to the same effect, ahead of the preface.

Edition In the browser Download
The book Read the book PDF, EPUB, Word
The poems Read the poems PDF, EPUB, Word
The young readers’ edition Read the edition PDF, EPUB, Word
The six-pager Read the memo PDF

What to read in it

  • The spec, manuscript/sections/_spec.md, and its trail, provenance/spec-trail.md.
  • The records of the workshop, room, blind read, roundtable and review that made parts of it, under provenance/.
  • The fifteen sessions it was written in, in provenance/store.
  • Its own checks, in sq_checks/: no em dash anywhere, and two inks in every figure.

Run it from its directory, in the repository:

cd examples/side-quest
quirework spec notes --primer
quirework spec trail the-name
quirework spec notes bind --slug the-name
quirework publish build

The Lighthouse Log

The Lighthouse Log is a small blog built by Hugo: the log of a fictional lighthouse keeper. Like the book, AI wrote it, and no person reviewed its posts. It has two posts in page bundles, one of them a draft. Each post has a spec of its own, with its reader, its thesis and its boundaries. A shared spec holds what both posts lean on, and a post that binds another’s claim is listed when that claim changes.

git ls-files
.claude/skills/lh-write-a-post/SKILL.md
AGENTS.md
CLAUDE.md
README.md
content/posts/_index.md
content/posts/what-the-fog-signal-is-for/index.md
content/posts/why-the-lamp-turns/index.md
hugo.toml
ideas/the-tide-clock/brief.md
procedures/catalog.json
procedures/catalog/README.md
procedures/workflows/write-a-post.md
quirework.toml
quirework/terms.toml
research/copies/coast-pilot.txt
research/sources.md
specs/_site.md
specs/a-keepers-first-winter/spec.md
specs/what-the-fog-signal-is-for/marks.md
specs/what-the-fog-signal-is-for/spec.md
specs/why-the-lamp-turns/marks.md
specs/why-the-lamp-turns/spec.md
Every file in the site. Hugo reads hugo.toml and content/. Quirework reads the rest, and the specs and notes sit outside the tree Hugo renders, so no visitor is ever served one. The skill under .claude/ is the entry point sop skills generated.
quirework spec units
  2031-03-02T09:00:00-03:00 published  why-the-lamp-turns                 Why the Lamp Turns
  2031-04-11                draft      what-the-fog-signal-is-for         What the Fog Signal Is For
planned (a spec, no post yet):
  a-keepers-first-winter             specs/a-keepers-first-winter/spec.md
ideas (no post has taken them up):
  the-tide-clock                     ideas/the-tide-clock/brief.md
Where each post stands: published, in draft, planned with a spec and no text yet, or an idea no post has taken up.

Its voice is checked like its structure. A post with an em dash fails quirework dev check. quirework text check reports a term from the project’s list where a reader would meet it, so the term is avoided, glossed on first use, or kept where it belongs.

The site is in the repository, with a README that lists the commands a companion runs on it.

Why they live in the repository

Each example is documentation and a test at once. The test suite runs their gates on every run, so a change to Quirework that would break a working project fails there, before it reaches anyone’s book or site.

Writing them found the bugs they were written to find: a directory named docs, a font stack read as a single family, a figure caption that wrapped across two lines, a nested project collecting the sessions of the repository around it. Every one passed a reading of the code and failed the first project that was not the one the code grew up in.