Cell design (design.cell)

specs/design/design.cell is the PRIMARY design source: a small project-level text file describing the architecture as a cell, carrying the design version's phase and every component's story citations. The console renders it live as you write it, so it is the FIRST design artifact you emit — and the platform derives from it: when the cell is saved, a design.json skeleton is scaffolded for every deployable component that has none, born with the cell's story citations. The component ids here MUST match the components/<name>/design.json names.

Cell-based architecture in AEP

The cell is the project boundary, drawn as an octagon. Your project's own components live inside it. Anything the project talks to that lives outside the project is drawn on one of the four boundaries, and which boundary encodes what kind of thing it is: