Reference Contract Builder

Reference Contract Builder

Use When

• A prompt uses benchmark videos, contact sheets, frames, product images,

persona images, style boards, or audio references.

• The model needs explicit learn/do-not-copy boundaries before generation.
• Some references should bind identity while others should be inspiration-only

or excluded from the first test.

Do Not Use When

• Do not decode the hook or opening mechanism here; use reference-decode.
• Do not force every reference into "learn from".
• Do not treat identity references as loose style inspiration unless the user says so.

Core Rule

Every reference set must answer:

1. Which references bind identity or consistency? 2. Which references are inspiration-only and must not be copied? 3. Which references are intentionally excluded for this test?

Default assumption: persona, product, and audio references are strong bindings unless the user explicitly marks them loose, benchmark-only, or weak guidance.

Default Workflow

1. Inventory the reference set: hook clip, hook-first contact sheet, style board, product image, persona image, audio reference, or other source. 2. Decide the test purpose: hook rhythm, camera realism, product proof, persona continuity, or another narrow target. 3. Classify each reference as binding, inspiration-only, or excluded for now. 4. Create a compact machine-readable contract when it is useful. 5. Print or return the contract before final prompt writing.

Output Shape

The artifact contains testPurpose, mayLearn, mustNotCopy, and excludedReferences. Add user-specific binding notes around that output when the prompt has real product, persona, or audio references.

Stop Conditions

• Stop when required user intent, source evidence, or owned input artifacts are

missing and guessing would change the result.

• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do

not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.

Handoff

• Hand contract.json to video-request-architect or the prompt writer.
• If the reference's hook logic is still unclear, hand to reference-decode first.

Public Command Boundary

• Choose the smallest matching command or workflow from the user input and run

it directly.

• If an owned CLI or script command fails, report the exact error and stop. Do

not bypass the failure with metadata-only answers, readiness probing, local payload rewrites, fallback providers, or unpublished tools.

• This public skill is instruction-driven. Produce the artifact described by the workflow directly from the available evidence.
• Do not call private provider/runtime paths or unpublished local tools.
• If the CLI returns a quote-confirmation challenge, run postplus quote confirm --json --challenge-file <challenge.json> and retry with the returned token.