Resolve authority before you compose.

AI can already read your repository. It can't tell what's authoritative.

An AI agent can already find every file with "button" in the name. What it can't do is tell which one is the real Button, which doc is current, or which component was deprecated last quarter.

That authority used to live only in the people who built the system. When project understanding lives in memory instead of the repository, every request guesses instead of resolving.

Planning and composition happen outside the runtime.

ds-runtime owns exactly one stage.

Deterministic steps. No guessing.

Discovery

Every artefact in the repository is catalogued.

Resolution

Candidates are narrowed to the one authoritative match.

Verification

Relationships between artefacts are checked, not assumed.

Explanation

The reasoning behind a match is exposed on request.

Failure

When nothing is authoritative, the runtime says so instead of guessing.

ds-runtime doesn't replace your design system. It becomes the map to it.

Actual output shape from ds-runtime. No embeddings, no semantic guessing — refusing to invent a component is a feature, not a failure.

Install once, then resolve your first component.

resolve returns the authoritative implementation, tokens, stories, docs, and tests. explain shows why.

Once you've validated the CLI path, connect a compatible agent with ds-runtime mcp --root .

ds-runtime resolves authority so humans and AI build from the same repository.

Like a compiler resolving symbols or a linker resolving references, ds-runtime makes an engineering constraint explicit — authoritative resolution — so agents stop guessing which artefact to trust.

Pre-1.0. CLI-first. MCP support experimental. Not yet on public npm.
Proving the contract holds matters more than expanding what the tool does.