Lab

A lab is a durable experiment surface inside a website the user runs: a page where a design idea gets built against real production components, tuned with live controls, and then kept — as an instrument to revisit and as design history. The /lab section is the wing of the site that holds them, with a sidebar to move between labs.

Labs are the opposite of throwaway prototypes. Never delete a lab — keep every lab, and record what a settled exploration decided in its metadata (the outcome note).

This skill is for setup: it installs the shell and teaches the host repo the vocabulary. Day-to-day lab authoring is then driven by the section it writes into the project's agents file — after setup, "make me a lab for X" needs no skill at all. If the project has no app-style routing or the user wants a standalone playground, the host can be a bare app whose only content is /lab.

The conventions

Canonical statement of the pattern. The agents-file template restates these for the host repo so it stands alone — an edit to either must be mirrored in the other.