Skip to content

Machine-Readable Output Modes

Date: 2026-05-21 Author: Codex

Focus

Implement Phase 2 of the summarize-inspired CLI evolution: add script-friendly output modes for fetch and transcribe while preserving Inkwell's existing human-facing workflow.

Progress

  • Started from the merged InputResolver / ContentSource foundation.
  • Scoped this pass to --json and --plain output modes only.
  • Keeping default Rich output unchanged for interactive users.
  • Routing progress, warnings, hints, and metadata to stderr in machine-output modes so stdout stays parseable.
  • Added focused CLI tests for JSON/plain stdout payloads and stderr progress behavior.
  • Verified the focused CLI suite and the full test suite locally.

Observations

PipelineOrchestrator and TranscriptionManager already return enough structured data for a useful envelope. The risky part is CLI presentation: fetch currently prints progress and summary directly while processing each episode, so machine-readable modes need to collect results and emit the primary payload only once at the end.

Next

Open the Phase 2 PR and watch CI. If it stays green, merge it before starting Phase 3 cache-key/version cleanup.

  • Related devlog: ./2026-05-21-summarize-inspired-cli-foundation.md
  • Related roadmap: ../../../2026-roadmap/09-multi-export-system.md
  • PR: #89
  • Issue: TBD