Agent-first design

tscfbench is designed for researchers who increasingly work through coding agents, tool-calling runtimes, or editor agents.

Design principles

• Spec-first. Prefer JSON specs over long free-form prompts.
• Bundle-first. Materialize manifests, digests, and artifact handles for each run.
• Handle-first. Read only the artifact slices you need.
• Turn separation. Keep planning/retrieval turns separate from compact editing turns.
• Docs as tools. Expose package explanation and comparison surfaces through CLI and tool schemas, not only prose.

What that means in practice

• build-agent-bundle writes a manifest, digest, context pack, and artifacts.
• plan-context assembles a bounded context plan for triage, analysis, editing, or reporting.
• repo-map gives agents a compact structural view of the repository.
• export-openai-tools and mcp-server expose the package as a tool surface.

Why this should save tokens

• Stable instructions and stable tool lists are easier to cache.
• Small artifact previews are cheaper than full data dumps.
• Editing turns work better when they only see the necessary files and diffs.