For AI agents#

braidio ships artifacts for coding agents alongside its code. This page lists them, says where each lives in the repository, and points at the machine-readable copies of this documentation.

Skills#

Skills are folders holding a SKILL.md (the Agent Skills format): a description that tells an agent when to use it and a body with the procedure. Install one into your agent with gh skill (any host: --agent claude-code, copilot, cursor, codex, gemini), or use the copy bundled in the wheel.

braidio#

Use braidio to produce narrated commentary audio — a podcast-style episode that talks about something (a song, a book, a film, a paper, an event) and weaves in clips of the source. Trigger on requests like “make a podcast-style commentary”, “turn this document/article/paper into an episode”, “narrate over these clips”, “two hosts discussing this”, “duo commentary track”, “panel discussion audio”, “roundtable about this”, “debate two sides of this”, “audio essay”, “documentary voice-over”, “Song Exploder style breakdown”, “interview-style audio”, “deep dive on this track”, “add a narrator over this song”, “voice this script with two speakers”, “commentary with clips of the original”. Covers: authoring the Script of beats, picking a ready-made format template (solo / deep-dive / interview / panel / debate / documentary VO), estimating the ElevenLabs cost before paying, pulling source audio into an asset library, and rendering the mixed episode. For plain audio/video editing (trim, fade, concat, transcribe, dub) use mixing instead; braidio is the layer that composes a production.

gh skill install thorwhalen/braidio braidio --agent claude-code

Source: braidio/data/skills/braidio (bundled with the pip package).

braidio-commentary-video#

Turn a braidio commentary episode into a watchable video — a Ken Burns pan/zoom film over still images, cut to the narration, optionally captioned and published. Use when someone wants a commentary/analysis video rather than audio: “make a video essay about this song”, “turn this episode into a video”, “Ken Burns video over these images”, “video version of the podcast”, “publish this commentary to YouTube”, “add visuals to the narration”, “slideshow video with narration”, “music video essay”. Covers picking the format and fixing the robotic-TTS defaults, planning panels from the render’s own timeline, sourcing freely-licensed stills, rendering with burns, building captions without ASR, and publishing privately with yb. For audio only, use the braidio skill; for generated footage, characters or shots, use reelee.

gh skill install thorwhalen/braidio braidio-commentary-video --agent claude-code

Source: braidio/data/skills/braidio-commentary-video (bundled with the pip package).

The bundled skills are also on disk after pip install braidio, under the package’s data/skills/ directory; link them into an agent without network access with skill link-skills <that directory>.

Subagents#

Subagents are Markdown files with a frontmatter (name, description, tools) and a system prompt as the body. Copy one into your project’s .claude/agents/ (or your agent host’s equivalent) to delegate the task it describes.

commentary-video#

Build a commentary video end to end from a subject — research it, author the script, render the audio with braidio, source freely-licensed stills, cut them into a Ken Burns film, caption it, and hand back a file (publishing only if asked). Use when someone names a target and wants the finished thing: “make a video essay about <song/book/film/paper>”, “do the Actually Romantic treatment for ”, “commentary video on ”. Returns the artifact paths, the sources it used, and anything it could not source. Does not publish without an explicit instruction to.

Source: .claude/agents/commentary-video.md; tools: Bash, Read, Write, Edit, Glob, Grep, WebSearch, WebFetch, Skill.

Instruction files#

Files agents read before working in this repository.

Machine-readable documentation#

This site publishes the same documentation in forms that fit an agent’s context window:

  • llms.txt: an index of every page with a one-line description (llms.txt format)

  • braidio.md: the whole documentation as one Markdown file

  • <page>.html.md: a rendered Markdown twin of every page, advertised from each page’s <head> with <link rel="alternate" type="text/markdown">

  • objects.inv: the Sphinx inventory: a symbol-to-URL index (sphobjinv convert plain objects.inv -)