# The terminal is a first-class frontend

```
Type: law
```

## The terminal is a first-class frontend

Adopted 2026-07-06. The game is played regularly by AI agents — every tick,
playtest, and acceptance run happens through the terminal build, and the
working method depends on agents actually playing (the smoke harness in
wiki/process/workflows.md is the definition of done's "observed in an actual
run"). The most frequent player of Misaligned is an agent. The terminal
frontend is therefore **not a disposable dev harness but a first-class
frontend**, held to pillar 4's beautiful-and-readable standard with the same
force as the Bevy build. A terminal that is ugly or illegible degrades every
future session's judgment of the game itself.

Three binding rules:

- **The clinical identity applies in character graphics.** Near-monochrome
  grey ramp (bone white → gunmetal → chrome) on near-black; **sterile amber
  is the single signal color** and means machine presence — the process, its
  hardware, its status, caution; **blood crimson means detection and danger**
  and nothing else. No decorative color.
- **Visibility best practices bind.** One meaning per color, everywhere.
  Information is never carried by color alone: suspicion bands print their
  names beside their meters, selection is reverse-video plus a marker, paused
  says PAUSED. Columns align; meters carry their numbers; the day and tick
  are always on screen; log lines carry the tick they happened on.
- **Parity of legibility.** Every mechanic the sim exposes must be playable,
  and every number legible, in the terminal — justification-and-legibility
  applies to terminal rendering with full force. A mechanic observable only
  in Bevy is a violation.
- **Agent play is a first-class input path.** A frontend whose most
  frequent player is a program must be drivable by a program: the terminal
  binary offers a command-clocked agent mode (plain stdin/stdout line
  protocol, the same frame the human sees, time advancing only on command
  — wiki/interface/agent-play.md). A pty with wall-clock pacing is never the only
  way in, and a mechanic playable only by raw-mode keystroke is a
  violation on par with one observable only in Bevy.