# Product Guidelines: Manual Slop

## Documentation Style

- **Strict & In-Depth:** Documentation must follow an old-school, highly detailed technical breakdown style (similar to VEFontCache-Odin). Focus on architectural design, state management, algorithmic details, and structural formats rather than just surface-level usage.

## UX & UI Principles

- **USA Graphics Company Values:** Embrace high information density and tactile interactions. 
- **Professional Arcade Aesthetics:** Balances high-energy "Arcade" feedback (blinking notifications, tactile updates) with a "Professional" visual discipline. Employs modern typography (Inter/Maple Mono), subtle rounded geometry, and soft shadows to ensure the tool feels like a sophisticated, expert utility. Includes a high-density **NERV Technical Console** theme option for maximum focus and CRT-inspired visual feedback.
- **Rich Text Readability:** Prioritizes legibility of AI communications and technical logs by utilizing GitHub-Flavored Markdown and integrated syntax highlighting. This ensures that complex code fragments and structured data are immediately accessible and professionally presented.
- **Explicit Control & Expert Focus:** The interface should not hold the user's hand. It must prioritize explicit manual confirmation for destructive actions while providing dense, unadulterated access to logs and context.
- **Multi-Viewport Capabilities:** Leverage dockable, floatable panels to allow users to build custom workspaces suitable for multi-monitor setups.

## Code Standards & Architecture

- **Data-Oriented & Immediate Mode Heuristics:** Align with the architectural values of engineers like Casey Muratori and Mike Acton. 
  - **The "Less Python Does, the Better" Rule:** Python should act primarily as a procedural semantic definer (similar to how ImGui defines a UI DAG), delegating heavy lifting to efficient data structures, vectorized operations, or lower-level primitives.
  - Minimize Python JIT overhead by favoring bulk data processing over fine-grained object-oriented manipulation.
  - The GUI (`gui_2.py`) must remain a pure visualization of application state. It should not *own* complex business logic or orchestrator hooks (strive to decouple the 'Application' controller from the 'View').
  - Treat the UI as an immediate mode frame-by-frame projection of underlying data structures.
  - Optimize for zero lag and never block the main render loop with heavy Python JIT work.
  - Utilize proper asynchronous batching and queue-based pipelines for background AI work, ensuring a data-oriented flow rather than tangled object-oriented state graphs.
- **Strict State Management:** There must be a rigorous separation between the Main GUI rendering thread and daemon execution threads. The UI should *never* hang during AI communication or script execution. Use lock-protected queues and events for synchronization.
- **Comprehensive Logging:** Aggressively log all actions, API payloads, tool calls, and executed scripts. Maintain timestamped JSON-L and markdown logs to ensure total transparency and debuggability.
- **Dependency Minimalism:** Limit external dependencies where possible. For instance, prefer standard library modules (like `urllib` and `html.parser` for web tools) over heavy third-party packages.

## AI-Optimized Compact Style

- **Indentation:** Exactly **1 space** per level. This minimizes token usage in nested structures.
- **Newlines:** Maximum **one (1)** blank line between top-level definitions. **Zero (0)** blank lines within function or method bodies.
- **Type Hinting:** Mandatory, strict type hints for all parameters, return types, and global variables to ensure high-signal context for AI agents.
