Font Lab

A decision surface for typography in AI-built software. AI removed the labor of implementation but deleted the moment of choice — and taste only happens at the moment of choice. Font Lab re-inserts the choosing moment: it hands a human a curated set of font directions, rendered live on their real running site, lets them pick, and the agent ships the implementation.

The human keeps the taste decision; the agent does the typing.

Docs

• CONCEPT.md — the vision and the core belief (the why).
• ARCHITECTURE.md — how the choosing moment works, the monorepo seams, and the central selection.json contract (the how).
• SHIP-SPEC.md — how a pick becomes real, reversible code in a real project (the link nobody else closes).
• ROADMAP.md — the v1 build order, milestone by milestone (the when).
• CRITIQUE.md — the teardown and decision log behind the plan (the why we chose this).

Status

The v1 slice is complete — M0 → M6 shipped. The go/no-go spike (M0) proved the live swap survives HMR and that preview equals ship; M1 is the end-to-end choosing loop; M2 is the reversible ship engine; M3 is the real analyzer (framework, router, Tailwind version, current fonts, wiring + coverage diagnostics), verified on the in-repo fixtures and the real jack-mcgovern.com site; M4 is the parity catalog + curator — a 41-font catalog of capsize-verified variable fonts and a deterministic, LLM-free curator; **M5 is the MCP server

• skill** that lets an agent drive the whole loop (and compose its own directions) while the human keeps the final pick; M6 polishes the choosing moment — mixed picks, pin-to-compare, more-like-this, and multi-route flipping, all driven in a real browser. See ROADMAP.md and cli/README.md for per-milestone evidence.

A human, inside their Next.js + Tailwind project, can invoke Font Lab, see tasteful directions rendered on their own running site in CSS that is byte-for-byte what ships, flip, compare, mix, and pick — and the agent applies the real next/font + Tailwind implementation, reversibly. The human kept the taste decision; the agent did the typing.