Recipe

A recipe is a curated pattern for a specific creative thing — a fire VFX, a stylised water shader, a procedurally- populated forest, a hit-confirm cutscene — written in a shape an AI assistant can read, adapt, and validate against.

Recipes exist because AI is great at adapting existing patterns and bad at generating them from scratch. If you ask an LLM to write a flamethrower particle effect from nothing, you get something plausible-looking that doesn’t actually run. If you give it three good flamethrower recipes and ask it to make a frost version, you usually get something that runs.

That’s the loop vibesmith bets on: retrieve → adapt → validate.

What a recipe looks like

A recipe is a directory with:

• the asset itself (a .tsl.ts shader, a .json VFX description, a .tsx cutscene timeline, etc.),
• metadata — name, category, parameters, tags,
• preview — a rendered image or short clip so the editor’s recipe browser shows it visually,
• a brief — natural-language description of what this recipe is, what it’s good for, what variants make sense.

The framework ships some recipes; your project adds its own under recipes/.

Recipe canon, not “library”

The framework’s bundled recipes are called the recipe canon. “Canon” because the framework treats them as the reference set the AI assistant retrieves from — the curated, validated baseline. Your project can extend it; it can’t replace it without losing the validation guarantees.

Categories you’ll see

• VFX — particle effects, decals, screen-shake, hit confirms.
• Shaders — TSL (Three Shading Language) recipes that compile to both WebGL and WebGPU.
• Audio mixes — bus presets, footstep-pitch envelopes, reverb settings.
• Cutscenes — timeline-driven camera + animation + VFX + audio composites.
• Instanced content — crowds, vegetation, modular building kits.

How a recipe gets used

Three entry points:

1. useVfxRecipe('fire') in a script — directly pulls a recipe into a running scene.
2. shader.generate-from-prompt from cmd+P — asks the AI to adapt a shader recipe to a description (“make this water look frozen”).
3. Author by example — copy a recipe folder, tweak the parameters, save it as a new recipe in your project.

Why this is load-bearing

The framework’s positioning bets on closing the AI-difficult-bits quality gap. Pure generation falls over on specialised creative work — VFX, shaders, cutscenes, mixing — because it requires deep domain knowledge and aesthetic judgment. Recipes pull that knowledge into the loop as a retrieval source.

If a recipe doesn’t exist for what you’re trying to build, write one. The framework’s value compounds with each curated entry.

Next

• Recipe canon — the substrate + retrieve-adapt-validate flow (internal-only spec; reference doc owed).
• Prefab — recipes are the building blocks prefabs are built on.
• Capability — the thing the framework can do layer that recipes sit alongside.