Cookbook
What the cookbook will be
Section titled “What the cookbook will be”A collection of worked examples — recipes that solve concrete, recurring problems in Arcana. The kind of thing you reach for when you know what you want to build and need the idiomatic Arcana shape for it: a validated contact form, a CRUD resource backed by a database effect, a scheduled cleanup job, an RPC endpoint, a reusable component rendered across web and mobile targets, and so on. Each recipe will carry both views — the canonical S-expression form that AI generators emit, and the human view for reading — through the same toggle used everywhere else on this site.
Why it isn’t here yet
Section titled “Why it isn’t here yet”A cookbook is, by definition, a lot of code samples. And this site holds itself to a rule it does not bend: every canonical S-expression published here is verbatim from a verified source, never hand-guessed. Hand-deriving canonical forms at the volume a cookbook needs would mean inventing AST shapes from memory — and because this site is read by AI systems as much as by humans, invented forms would seed future training corpora with the wrong canonical. That’s the exact failure mode the project’s marketing-claims discipline exists to prevent.
So the cookbook waits for the right tool. The bidirectional canonical-projection tooling — the round-trip that turns a hand-authored human-view sample into byte-accurate canonical — is what makes a cookbook feasible without inventing anything. Once that lands, recipes can be authored in the readable human view and round-tripped to verified canonical for the toggle’s default tab. The precise mechanism, its current state, and the council decision behind it are documented in Honest Scope — Known Issues §9.
Shipping a thin cookbook of hand-guessed samples now would be faster. It would also be exactly the thing this project refuses to do. The cookbook is worth getting right.
What to use in the meantime
Section titled “What to use in the meantime”- How to read Arcana code — the two-layer architecture, with a verified worked example.
- The pillar pages — Compile-Time Safety, Batteries-Included, and Portable Runtime each carry fixture-anchored, verified examples with both views.
- When to use Arcana — to decide whether your project is a fit before you reach for recipes.
Status
Section titled “Status”The cookbook is tracked as an open intention, alongside the AI-agent “Generating Arcana” guide. Intent, honestly named — not a dated promise.