Transparent Icons

Generate flat scientific icons with transparent backgrounds, styled by the project's figures/theme.json, for use as panel elements in figures:scientific-figure, in figures:svg-primitives schematics, or on their own in posters, slides, and grants. Sister skills are invoked by their fully qualified figures:<skill> names through the host's skill-invocation mechanism. Keep host-specific command or tool syntax in the host adapter, not in shared skill instructions.

Backends

Generation goes through the shared backend in plugins/figures/lib/image_backend.py, the same one figures:ai-full-figure uses.

1. Codex CLI image_gen (default when codex is logged in). No API key needed. The model and effort come from the theme's model_preferences (default gpt-5.6-luna at xhigh), which lands good icons at the cheapest tier in one to two minutes each.
2. OpenAI Images API (--backend api) with OPENAI_API_KEY.
3. Atlas Cloud (--backend atlas) with ATLASCLOUD_API_KEY. This is explicit-only; it never changes the Codex-first auto route. The default model is black-forest-labs/flux-schnell, and the asynchronous result is polled with a bounded timeout.

The backend preflights Codex with a 10 second timeout and explains the fix when the binary hangs (approve it once from Terminal.app, or copy codex and codex-code-mode-host to a folder you own, xattr -c both, and set CODEX_BIN). --backend fake renders placeholder icons for tests.

Transparency