Valid-looking JSON can still paint nothing
Schema shape alone does not prove that representative frames contain visible pixels in a real player.
Case Study: Open-Source Developer Tool
MotionProof / Certified Motion Compiler
Prompt or recipe in. Five production artifacts—or a structured failure—out.
A provider-neutral prompt-to-Lottie pipeline where agents can own the attempt, but deterministic evidence owns the release.
Certified production exhibit
01
The reliability gap
Generation made motion faster. It did not make motion shippable.
The pipeline started from a blunt observation: an agent can produce convincing source and a nice first preview while still handing engineering an artifact that is inaccessible, environment-dependent, visually empty, or impossible to audit.
A preview can hide a portability failure
Expressions, external assets, remote fonts, and unsupported layer types may work in one environment and fail in the target runtime.
An animation is not yet a handoff
Production needs reduced-motion fallback, review surface, provenance, hashes, and an all-or-nothing release boundary—not one loose JSON file.
02
Product judgment
Separate proposal from authority
MotionProof does not care which intelligence proposed the animation. It cares whether the artifact survives the same deterministic production contract.
Propose
A deterministic recipe, coding agent, model, human, or imported Lottie candidate enters through the same portable request contract.
Prove
Strict structure, vector-only content, quality, real Chromium frames, meaningful motion, payload, and poster checks run outside the provider.
Promote
Only a passing candidate becomes one atomic bundle with animation, poster, preview, certification, manifest, hashes, and provenance.
“An agent may own the attempt. It does not own the definition of done.”
03
Release proof
The claim is backed by a command anyone can rerun
The complete release gate rebuilds deterministic assets, tests the contracts, renders the production library, packs the npm distribution, installs it in a clean consumer, creates a real bundle, and completes an MCP handshake.
52
Automated tests across generation, certification, packaging, MCP, and runtime policy
27/27
Production Lotties strict-valid and visibly rendered in Chromium
5
Hashed artifacts promoted together in every certified bundle
Reproduce the release decision
npm ci
npm run check:releaseEvidence summary
MotionProof / Certified Motion Compiler
The role, enforced constraints, product judgment, and reproducible release evidence behind the public build.
- Role
- Set the product contract and directed an agent-assisted implementation and release across the SDK, CLI, MCP server, Agent Skill, plugin bundles, certifier, and product studio.
- Constraints
- The core had to stay provider-neutral and zero-key by default, reject executable or external Lottie content, produce a reduced-motion poster, stay within a 500 kB animation budget, and promote complete bundles atomically.
- Judgment
- Separated proposal from authority: any model, agent, recipe, or human can propose a candidate, but only deterministic structure, quality, browser-render, motion, payload, and accessibility gates can promote it.
- Evidence
- The release gate passed 52 automated tests, strict validation for 27 of 27 production Lotties, Chromium rendering for 27 of 27, a clean consumer-package install, a certified five-artifact smoke bundle, and a three-tool MCP handshake.
04
Drop-in surfaces
Agent-agnostic by contract, agent-friendly by distribution
The compiler surface stays small enough for a host application to own its provider, credentials, billing, and model policy. MotionProof owns only the portable request, proof, and artifact boundaries.
Typed SDK
Applications bring any provider through one small interface.
JSON CLI
Humans and coding agents get stable stdout, exit codes, and structured failure.
Local MCP
Three tools expose creation, certification, and recipe discovery.
Agent Skill
One portable workflow teaches compatible hosts the same definition of done.
05
Artifact contract
The output is a handoff, not a loose animation
Every certified result carries the runtime asset, accessibility fallback, review surface, machine-readable proof, and release provenance together.
- animation.json
- Editable, certified vector motion
- poster.png
- Reduced-motion and no-JavaScript fallback
- preview.html
- Portable offline review surface
- certification.json
- Checks, quality, and raster evidence
- manifest.json
- Hashes, provenance, prompt hash, and artifact inventory
06
Open-core choice
Make the core useful enough to earn adoption
The SDK, CLI, MCP server, Agent Skill, plugins, deterministic recipes, certifier, and local studio ship under the recipient's choice of MIT or Apache-2.0—including commercial use.
If the project gains traction, revenue can come from separately distributed recipe packs, hosted collaboration, private brand systems, team governance, support, and OEM implementation. Released open-core rights do not move backward.
07
My role
Product direction, system contract, and release ownership
I set the product bar, chose the provider-neutral and fail-closed architecture, directed the agent-assisted implementation, and held the result to a public, reproducible release gate. The point was not to hide the agents. It was to prove that agent-built software can still have a legible owner, explicit judgment, and evidence strong enough for someone else to trust.