v1.1.0 prep: paper template, build-time previews, agent surface

Andrew Dunnrequested to merge
v1.1.0-prep into main

Summary

Second release of the Public Sector reference. Substantive additions across templates, build system, agent surface, and the reference site itself. No breaking schema changes; consumer .reference.yaml files keep working.

What's in this MR

  • templates/paper/ -- third project template alongside lab/ and docs/. Two-column academic LaTeX with design/typeset/gitlab.sty. make new-project TEMPLATE=paper stamps a working paper repo wired to the paper@~latest catalog component.
  • Ephemeral build-time template previews (site/scripts/capture-template-previews.mjs). Stamps each template, screenshots lab/docs via Playwright Chromium, renders paper to PDF via tectonic|pdflatex|docker and converts page one with pdftoppm. Decoupled from make build.
  • New CI job capture-template-previews using the catalog's ci-latex image. The job inline-installs python3 + nodejs + npm via dnf because the source container does not yet carry those deps; a follow-up MR will upstream the installs into the container to reduce pipeline time.
  • design/chrome/docs/ as single source of truth for the docs template's tokens + chrome CSS. Eliminates drift between the reference's home page styling and a freshly-stamped docs site.
  • withBase() helper propagated to templates/docs/; mandated in the new docs-authoring.md guide.
  • Agent surface expansion: root-level .ai/*.md and template-level authoring guides publish as /agents/<topic>/ via the llms-txt integration.
  • Start section restructured: /start/ landing page; /start/adopt/ and /start/contribute/ are now first-class pages.
  • Nine-capability home page replaces the prior five-card layout.
  • Brand-artifact discipline codified in standards/repository/SKILL.md: heroes and avatars do not track versions, no layout trees, SVG over mermaid, principles over instance labels.

Why an MR (not direct to main)

Validating the CI surface against the catalog's ci-latex container before tagging v1.1.0. This MR is the staging area for:

  1. Confirming capture-template-previews runs end-to-end against the catalog image and emits the three PNG artifacts.
  2. Confirming stage-cascade hands the PNGs to the pages job correctly.
  3. Iterating on any catalog-side gaps that surface (the inline dnf install step is the most likely candidate for upstream consolidation).

Deferred

  • pipeline/reference-check catalog component (planned for catalog v3.1.0). Until it ships, consumers run make check REPO=$CI_PROJECT_DIR in a project-side CI job. The .reference.yaml schema this release stabilizes is forward-compatible.
  • Sector-specific control subsets.
  • Standard-status flips on the published v1.0.0 schedule.

Test plan

  • make validate passes locally (verified)
  • glab ci lint passes (verified)
  • make build passes locally without captures in ~7s (verified)
  • CI pipeline runs green on this branch
  • capture-template-previews job produces all three PNG artifacts
  • Pages job receives PNGs via stage-cascade and publishes them
  • Spot-check published /templates/lab/, /templates/docs/, /templates/paper/ pages render the captured previews

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