Content tooling: build the lossless core and safe headless CLI

[zoeyrose]

Parent and roadmap

• Parent tracker: Replace Gridarta with the standalone MIT Rust editor editor#13
• Roadmap: Roadmap: replace classic Atrinik with a fresh MIT Go and Rust stack atrinik#168
• Roadmap milestone: M1
• Prerequisites: Content tooling: establish grammar contracts and a lossless parity corpus #17, Content schema: define authoritative schemas and generated field metadata #15, Proposal: establish stable content identities and cross-reference validation #19

Outcome

Implement the single lossless authored-content core and versioned headless CLI used by editors, checkers, scripts, and AI automation.

Scope

• Implement lossless parsing, typed semantic views, source spans, targeted serialization, project indexing, asset/catalog lookup, and common diagnostics.
• Provide bounded JSON inspection, validation, semantic diff, and primitive patch operations with meaningful exit codes.
• Require digest/node preconditions, dry-run review, all-or-nothing multi-file transactions, and same-directory atomic replacement.
• Refuse generated, collected, packaged, and mutable runtime write targets by default; migrate one representative checker/audit consumer to prove the API.

Superseded path / cleanup target

Remove a duplicated parser only after its complete rules pass the shared parity corpus. Do not link authoring tools to live server objects or new_save_map().

Acceptance criteria

• Unchanged files serialize byte-for-byte and targeted edits do not churn unrelated tokens or objects.
• Comments, unknown custom data, multiline text, nesting, attribution, and authored order survive supported edits.
• Stale or invalid multi-file patches fail before any source file changes.
• CLI JSON is deterministic and schema-valid on Linux and Windows.
• At least one existing checker/audit path consumes the common model with parity tests.

Validation baseline

Before: tools parse and rewrite overlapping subsets independently and machine edits lack a common transaction contract.

After: one reusable core and CLI safely serve human and automated authored-content workflows.

Run the corpus round trips, transaction failure injection, JSON-schema tests, migrated checker tests, and targeted Python/native builds.

This issue is a bounded child of atrinik/editor#13. The parent remains open until every sibling child is complete.

[github-actions]

🎉 This issue has been resolved in version 1.8.0 🎉

The release is available on:

• v1.8.0
• GitHub release

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