Questions a skeptic asks
Plain answers — for the engineer who reviews everything and the builder who reviews nothing.
Isn’t this just a boilerplate, or shadcn, or an npm package?
No. A boilerplate you fork once and maintain forever — it drifts, and nothing re-verifies it. An npm package is a hidden dependency that changes under you. shadcn is the same vendoring idea for UI, with no verification. Ctrl AI is vendored code you own plus a machine-readable contract, a conformance suite, an attestation that expires, and a lock that stops your agent drifting it.
My agent writes me custom code. Why would I want “standard” infrastructure?
Custom is exactly the problem for auth, billing, and webhooks: a stateless agent writes them a little differently every session, and the differences are where the bugs live. You want these boringly identical and tested — and your agent’s creativity spent on your product, not on re-deriving a session check for the hundredth time.
Can my agent actually not edit the parts?
It can write the file — but a pre-commit hook and CI reject the change, so it can’t land past your build, and an import-boundary scan blocks reaching into a part’s internals. In practice the agent reads the rule in AGENTS.md, hits the wall once, and goes back to wiring the seams.
What if I need to change a part?
Two doors. Flip its vendor in one commit (ctrlai upgrade --adapter=), or ctrlai eject to take full ownership and hand-edit it. The lock is a default you can opt out of, not a prison.
What’s a seam?
The thin app-specific glue where a part meets your product — the only code your agent writes for that capability. The email part sends mail; your seam is your welcome-email template. The billing part talks to Stripe; your seam is your plan catalog. Every part ships a seams.md so your agent wires it without ever reading the interior.
What does “verified” actually mean — is it cryptographically signed?
It means the part’s conformance suite passed and the proof hasn’t expired — a 14-day window, re-run on a public schedule, so a part that breaks against a new dependency goes visibly stale instead of silently wrong. It is not cryptographically signed yet; attestations are dev-tier and real signing is on the roadmap. We’d rather say so than imply more.
I don’t really read the code I ship. Does this still help me?
Especially you. The parts most likely to bite you — auth, billing, webhooks, secrets — come in already tested and locked, so the code you can’t review is the code you didn’t have to. You still own and review the thin seams on top; everything below them is tested code.
Is it a dependency or a service I’m locking into?
Neither. ctrlai add copies the source into your repo (MIT) — no runtime, no server in your request path, no account. The registry is consulted only when you install or upgrade. ctrlai verify runs fully offline, and there’s no telemetry.
Which stacks does it support?
v0 is deliberately narrow: TypeScript, Node 22+, Next.js App Router, and Postgres — one reference stack many parts deep, rather than many stacks one part deep. The contract format is stack-agnostic by design; more stacks come after real projects ship on this one.
What does it cost?
The registry, the CLI, and every part are free and open source (MIT). The eventual business is certification and private registries for teams — which only works if the public registry stays neutral, so Ctrl AI certifies vendors and sells none of them.
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