Credits

Who builds Ascribe, the projects it’s built on, and where its ideas came from.

Who builds Ascribe

Made by Bryo Studio, which is Kyle Rollins, with Claude. Kyle Rollins maintains Ascribe, and Claude, Anthropic’s model, works on it through Claude Code. The maintainer decides what’s built and reads what ships. Most of the code, the tests, and the docs are written by Claude under those decisions.

What Ascribe is built on

The projects a reader would want to know about, and what Ascribe uses each for. The manifests in the repository list every dependency, with its version.

Inside the binary

Ascribe’s parser is a fork of comrak, a CommonMark parser written in Rust, taken at its release v0.55.0 and changed so that a directive line is a block of its own. comrak’s license travels with the fork, and every change to it is listed in the fork’s notes.

clap reads the command line.
ariadne draws a diagnostic under the source line it’s about.
serde reads and writes the JSON, YAML, and TOML.
toml reads ascribe.toml.
schemars writes the JSON Schemas of what the commands print.

In the npm packages

Astro is what @ascribed/astro is an integration for.
Sätteri, Astro’s default Markdown processor, and unified, the other one the integration supports, carry its Markdown plugin.
github-slugger works out a page’s entry id from its file’s name, as Astro does.

Programs Ascribe runs and doesn’t ship

You install these yourself, when you use the command that runs them.

Vale checks the prose, for ascribe vale.
lychee asks each external link whether it still works, for ascribe report links.
afdocs, the Web Documentation Delivery Spec’s checker, checks what a built site publishes for AI agents, for ascribe report delivery.

Building Ascribe and its site

Pagefind indexes this site for its search, which needs no service.
Playwright drives Chromium for the site’s tests, the element library’s, and the extension’s.
Vitest runs the JavaScript tests.
insta keeps the Rust tests’ snapshots, and proptest feeds the parser generated input.
TypeScript, oxlint, and Prettier check the JavaScript packages.
esbuild bundles the editor extension, and the script ascribe diff puts in its HTML preview.
sharp and opentype.js draw the icons and social cards.
axe-core checks the element library for accessibility.

Where its ideas came from

Each of these is said where Ascribe uses it, and linked here.

From	What Ascribe took
CommonMark	The language everything else is added to. Every CommonMark document means the same in Ascribe, apart from a line that starts with a directive (the specification, §1.4).
Bluehawk	The tags that mark a region of a code file for `@snippet`, kept as they are, so code already tagged for it works (directives).
AsciiDoc	A title on its own line, above the directive it names (the specification’s rationale).
Swift’s `@available`	Lifecycle states named by the version they start at, so availability needs no ranges (the specification’s rationale).
HTML’s custom elements	A hyphen in a name marks a project’s own widgets (the specification’s rationale).
Elastic’s docs-builder	Links with empty text, filled from their target, and a large corpus to measure choices against (the specification’s rationale).
Ruby and Lua	A bare `@end` to close a container (the specification’s rationale).
The Web Documentation Delivery Spec	What a build publishes for AI agents: `llms.txt`, and each page’s Markdown at its address (the Astro guide).
The Good Docs Project	The page templates, once they’re built (the plan).
Steel threads, by Jade Rubick	How every plan’s phases are ordered: the first is the thinnest path through every layer, working and shipped (the skill).