Cookbook — The Recipe System

The cookbook (alc/cookbook/) is Alchemy's automation engine. Recipes are CI/CD for creative work — triggered at task phase boundaries by artists, not imposed as a monolithic pipeline.

Phases

Every task moves through a semantic arc:

start → build → art → render → review → refresh → publish

plus IO phases ingest and deliver. start is first-class: opening a task is itself an automated step (version-up, scene build, context load).

Anatomy

Object	Role
Recipe	A named automation for a (software × task × phase) combination
RecipeStep	One step: name, software, task, recipe_type, step_type
Cookbook	The full recipe library for a studio

Each RecipeStep carries enough metadata to be handed to a micro-agent:

• goal — what to do
• pass_criteria / fail_criteria — what success and failure look like
• agentic_first_pass — whether an agent should attempt it autonomously

Resolution and dispatch

Recipe.resolve() performs cross-DCC fallback: if a recipe isn't defined for the current software, the resolver can fall back to another software that implements the same (task, phase). The run_task orchestrator versions up, resolves the recipe, and executes phases in order — dispatching each step to the right software plugin via the create / edit / query contract.

Surfaces

Recipes surface to artists as menu, shelf (icon bar), and context_menu entries inside each DCC — generated from the cookbook, so adding a recipe automatically adds its UI.

Authoring

Recipes are authored in the in-app Cookbook IDE (app/tools/cookbook/), which edits the recipe definitions and step code directly.