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page-craft-engine: the shared craft engine

Pages & funnels Not user-invocable

This is the engine inside the page builder, documented so you know what is happening to your page. You do not call it. page-architect loads it at specific moments during a build.

It owns three stages:

1. The persuasion map. Before a word of copy is written, the page gets a per-section architecture: what job each section does, what belief it has to install, what objection it has to clear, and what evidence it uses. This is what stops a page being a pile of nice paragraphs in a plausible order.

2. The copy stage. Copy gets written by a dedicated copy pass, not as a side effect of building HTML. It produces a copy document, runs a headline tournament (real competition between options, not one headline and a shrug), an adversarial copy-chief loop, and an anti-fingerprint gate that checks the writing does not read like the last ten pages the toolkit produced.

3. The design contract. At the point a visual direction is approved, the actual design tokens get extracted from the approved mockup into a real token file: spacing scale, type ramp, radii, shadows, containers. The build is then measured against that file. This is what prevents the familiar drift where the approved mockup is beautiful and the final page has nine corner radii and twenty-six font sizes.

For live-traffic pages it also runs the pre-ship conversion gate, a red-team pass before the page goes live.

You never trigger it. It fires automatically inside a page build:

  • At angle lock, to author the persuasion map.
  • At visual lock, to extract the design contract.
  • During the copy stage.
  • At build dispatch and pre-ship QA.

Two reasons worth knowing about:

  • It explains why a page build has gates. If a build stops and asks you to approve a headline or a visual direction, this is why, and the approval is what locks the contract everything downstream is measured against.
  • It is shared. The same engine serves the landing-page builder and the assessment builder, which is why pages from both feel like they were made by the same shop.
  • A persuasion map in the build output, so you can see the argument before the page exists.
  • A headline tournament result, with the runners-up kept as test variants rather than discarded.
  • A design-tokens.css file for the page, which the craft gate checks the finished build against.
  • A copy document, locked before the build agent starts, so the build renders approved copy rather than improvising it.
  • Do not try to invoke it. It has no standalone entry point by design; it is stage machinery, and running a stage out of order produces nothing useful.
  • The gates are the value. A build that skips the persuasion map produces a page that looks fine and argues badly.
  • Approve deliberately at the locks. The design contract extracted at visual lock governs the whole build, so approving a direction you are lukewarm about locks in that lukewarm direction.

Loaded by page-architect. Works alongside design-architect and calls red-team for the pre-ship gate on live-traffic pages.