The compilation pipeline

When you run agentc build, the compiler processes your agent.acl manifest through three high-level stages and produces a deployable artifact. Understanding these stages helps you reason about build times, cache behavior, and where a build can fail.

The generated project

Between the second and third stages, a complete project is written to artifacts/generated. For the standalone archetype, this is a standard Rust workspace. You can open it, read the generated source, modify it by hand, or build it directly with cargo build --release without the agentc CLI.

Stopping before compilation

Two commands let you observe the pipeline without running it to completion.

agentc generate runs the first two stages and the generation step, then stops before compiling. The generated project is written to artifacts/generated. This is useful for inspecting what was generated, making manual modifications before building, or debugging a compilation failure.

agentc inspect parses and resolves the manifest without running any build stages. It prints the fully resolved configuration with all locals expanded and runtime() values replaced by their defaults. Secrets are redacted.

Where to go next

• Archetypes: what the generate-and-compile stage produces, and the toolchain it needs.
• Extend code generation with blocks: inject your own files into the generated project.
• agentc build: every flag on the build command.
• agentc generate and agentc inspect: the commands that stop early.