Topics

A grab-bag of pages on topics that don't fit cleanly under Steps, Verifiers, or Authoring. Each topic page is a deep dive on one thing.

Available topics

• Video capture — record native Playwright WebM evidence and use screenshots with backends that do not support recording.
• Process monitoring — sample the browser process tree with --monitor; the monitor step and process verifier turn "the spec got slow" into an assertable budget.
• Services lifecycle — the config-driven docker/seed/tmux environment cairn run owns, and when to disable it per environment.

Authoring a topic page

A topic page is allowed when:

• It is not a step kind, verifier, or configuration key. Those have stable homes elsewhere.
• It explains a choice the spec author or runner maintainer has to make.
• It has at least one concrete example.

Topic pages are not a place to dump changelog or implementation notes. If you find yourself writing "in version 1.27.0 we changed X," that's a release note, not a topic — put it in CHANGELOG.md instead.

What we don't host here

• Walkthroughs that fit a learning path. Those go in tutorials or videos.
• Per-PR implementation details. Those go in commit messages and changelog.
• Opinion pieces on testing philosophy. Those go in essays.

See also

• Overview — what cairntrace is
• Authoring — what makes a contract survive