Five Documentation Sites Live on Vercel | thelacanians Open Source

This weekend we shipped the full documentation layer for the five pieces of the local-first behavior infrastructure that we keep building on top of each other:

• vidtrace.dev — turn bug screen recordings into timestamped evidence bundles for humans and coding agents.
• codemap.tools — code intelligence: a structural code graph plus semantic search, surfaced through a CLI, an MCP server, and a studio TUI.
• glyphrun.dev — behavior runner for terminal applications. Drives any PTY-based app from YAML or JSON specs.
• cairntrace.dev — cairn’s younger sibling: behavior runner for browsers, with the same intent-plus-outcomes contract.
• monitorcli.dev — local observability hub for macOS: a Bubble Tea TUI, a JSON CLI, and a seven-tool MCP server behind one shared model.

All five are now live on the the-lacanians Vercel team, behind five custom domains, with VitePress at the bottom of every one. That was the missing piece.

What Shipped

vidtrace and codemap were the fastest of the five. Both repos already had a complete docs/ folder with a working VitePress build. The deployment was a single vercel deploy from the repo root.

glyphrun needed the full VitePress scaffolding. Excellent markdown content was already in the repo: overview.md, authoring.md, the step and verifier vocabularies, a cairntrace-comparison.md design doc. What was missing was the sidebar, the nav, and a stray unclosed <spec-or-name> HTML tag that was crashing Vue’s compiler at line 942 of one file. We fixed the tag, wrote the config, and shipped.

cairntrace had the smallest content surface, so the scaffold was built from scratch. Three pages: a homepage, an overview, and a quickstart. Subsequent commits will port the markdown content from the repo rather than dumping the whole library at once.

monitor had a docs/ folder with its own package.json and a working vitepress dev script. The deployment friction was that monitoring is a Go project and the repo has 30k+ files that Vercel’s uploader rejects by default. The fix was --archive=tgz to pack the upload before counting. A .vercelignore keeps the upload lean.

Why This Matters

For two years the most common feedback on every one of these projects has been the same: “I love the CLI, where are the docs?” The answer was always that the documentation lived in the README, in the AGENTS.md, and in a half-finished docs/ folder that nobody had promoted to a real site.

Local-first tools are easy to install but slow to trust. A working binary that no one can read about is a worse marketing story than a half-baked SaaS with a beautiful landing page. Shipping five documentation sites at once does not change the products. It changes what people think the products are.

A docs site also forces vocabulary decisions the codebase keeps deferring. While writing the cairntrace sidebar, we had to write down which step kinds and which verifier types are actually the contract versus which ones are aspirational. That diff between “what the spec parser accepts” and “what the sidebar promises” is exactly the kind of small accountability the ecosystem needed.

What Is Next

Each site will keep growing. The cairntrace and glyphrun authoring guides are the next port — long-form, opinionated, with the same intent-plus-outcomes taxonomy that already structures the runtimes. The codemap site is the most complete and will become the reference for the rest: precise indexers, knowledge-layer annotations, and the cross-project queries that are the actual reason the graph exists.

The cross-project story is the more interesting one. vidtrace, codemap, glyphrun, cairntrace, and monitor are five different tools that share a vocabulary:

• An agent loop — every CLI command has --json, every CLI binary has an MCP server, every spec is a durable thing an agent can author, run, and read.
• A behavior contract — intent plus outcomes for browser and terminal behavior, knowledge annotations on the code graph, profile JSON for monitored processes, evidence bundles for video bug reports.
• A local-first execution model — no accounts, no servers, no telemetry, no data leaving the laptop.

The five sites look like five side projects. They are one project — the local-first behavior infrastructure we have been assembling for two years and finally gave a public surface.

Links

• vidtrace.dev · codemap.tools · glyphrun.dev · cairntrace.dev · monitorcli.dev
• All source on github.com/abdul-hamid-achik
• The operating company is thelacanians.com