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+# Bookmark — Agent & Developer Context
+
+Bookmark is a camera-driven book intake and checkout inventory system built
+for **Books in Hand**, a nonprofit that keeps books out of landfills and in
+people's hands. It is a standalone client project — not part of the
+CircuitForge product line, no BSL tiering, no CircuitForge license server
+integration. Owned by / donated to the nonprofit.
+
+This file is the entry point for any AI coding assistant (Claude Code,
+Codex, Cursor, etc.) or human contributor picking up this codebase. Read it
+before making changes.
+
+## What This Project Does
+
+Two physical stations, camera-driven:
+
+1. **Intake station** — a volunteer places a book on a marked platform under
+   a downward-facing webcam. The system captures front and back photos in a
+   guided flow, determines a `small` / `medium` / `large` size bucket
+   **deterministically** (by checking which physical platform markers are
+   covered vs. exposed — no OCR, no ML), and writes a row to a CSV
+   catalogue. This size bucket feeds Books in Hand's year-end tax and
+   501(c)(3) reporting, including charitable write-off valuation — it must
+   stay deterministic because a wrong bucket has real financial
+   consequences.
+2. **Checkout station** (later phase) — reuses the same camera +
+   identification pipeline (barcode decode, vision-LLM fallback) to mark
+   books as taken, updating the same CSV.
+3. **Batch OCR/ISBN backfill** (later phase) — a separate pass, run on
+   demand on GPU-equipped hardware, decodes ISBN barcodes first and falls
+   back to a local vision-LLM (VLM) to read the cover when no barcode is
+   present, filling in title/author/ISBN for the catalogue and the future
+   public website. Low-confidence matches are flagged for human review —
+   never auto-published.
+
+**Full design rationale and phase-by-phase build order live in:**
+- Design spec: `circuitforge-plans/books-in-hand/superpowers/specs/2026-07-13-inventory-system-design.md`
+- Phase 1 implementation plan: `circuitforge-plans/books-in-hand/superpowers/plans/2026-07-13-bookmark-intake-station-plan.md`
+
+Those live in a separate private planning repo and won't always be
+available to whoever is working in this repo — treat this file as the
+self-contained summary; the sections below capture what those docs decided.
+
+## Terminology
+
+Never use the generic term "AI" in code, comments, docs, or UI copy. Name
+the specific mechanism instead: "LLM", "VLM" (vision-LLM), "OCR", "barcode
+decode". This keeps claims about what the system does precise and avoids
+overstating capability.
+
+## Architecture (Phase 1 — Intake, the only phase built so far)
+
+- **Backend:** Python 3.11+, FastAPI + Uvicorn. `bookmark/main.py` exposes
+  `create_app(session, camera)`. Routes live in `bookmark/api/routes.py`.
+- **State machine:** `bookmark/session.py`'s `IntakeSession` drives the
+  guided front → back → next-book flow, calling into:
+  - `bookmark/sizing.py` — pure, deterministic marker-occlusion check
+    (`determine_size_bucket`). No ML.
+  - `bookmark/image_processing.py` — pure crop-to-book function
+    (`crop_to_book`), contour-diff against a calibrated empty-platform
+    reference frame.
+  - `bookmark/catalogue.py` — CSV read/write layer (`Catalogue`,
+    `BookRecord`). The CSV (`catalogue.csv`) is the single source of truth
+    for Phase 1 — no database.
+  - `bookmark/capture_strategies/` — three swappable, interchangeable
+    trigger strategies behind one `CaptureStrategy` interface, selected via
+    config (never hardcode one): `manual_button.py` (button/key press),
+    `motion_stop.py` (frame-diff stabilization countdown),
+    `stable_centered.py` (auto-detect a book filling the guide box and
+    holding steady).
+- **Camera:** `bookmark/camera.py`'s `CameraSource` wraps `cv2.VideoCapture`
+  behind a `FrameSource` protocol so tests can substitute a fake camera.
+- **Frontend:** plain HTML/CSS/JS kiosk page in `bookmark/static/` — no
+  build step. `theme.css` is the central theme file (colors, spacing,
+  typography as CSS variables, light/dark aware); `style.css` holds
+  component styles that reference those variables. Keep all future
+  frontend work theme-aware and responsive through this same file — don't
+  hardcode colors/spacing in component CSS or inline styles.
+- **Config/entrypoint:** `bookmark/config.py`'s `AppConfig.load()` reads
+  `config.json` (per-install, gitignored — copy from `config.example.json`
+  and fill in real marker/guide-box pixel coordinates from
+  `calibrate.py`'s output). `run.py` wires everything together for
+  production; `calibrate.py` is a one-time-per-install interactive script
+  that captures the empty-platform reference frame.
+
+## Hardware Context (informs future phases, not code in this repo yet)
+
+Donated hardware: a 3U server (AMD EPYC Rome 8-core, 32GB DDR4, nVidia A400
+— upgradeable to RTX 4000, 512GB NVMe + 4TB SATA SSD) hosts the intake
+station and, in Phase 2+, a shared local vision-LLM service that both
+intake and the future checkout kiosk(s) call over the LAN. Up to 3 Intel
+NUCs (mixed generation) are available for kiosk stations. Cameras are
+**not** provided — a USB webcam per active station still needs sourcing.
+
+## Global Constraints (binding across all phases)
+
+- No cloud services anywhere in Phase 1. Phase 2's only outbound network
+  calls are ISBN/title lookups against Open Library / Google Books, made
+  only after barcode decode or local VLM inference has already run.
+- Size-bucketing must stay deterministic (geometry/visibility only) —
+  never derive it from OCR, ML, or an LLM/VLM step.
+- Both the wide (uncropped, shows platform markers) and cropped (book-only)
+  images are kept for every capture — the wide image is the audit trail
+  for size-bucketing.
+- No authentication/login on either station (nonprofit, low-stakes,
+  kiosk-appropriate).
+- LLM/VLM output (Phase 2+) assists; a human reviews and approves before
+  anything gets published to the future public site — never auto-publish.
+
+## Development Workflow
+
+- Python: `.venv/bin/pip install -e ".[dev]"` from repo root.
+- Tests: `.venv/bin/pytest -v` — TDD throughout; every module has a test
+  file under `tests/` that exercises it without real camera hardware
+  (synthetic NumPy frames, mocked `cv2.VideoCapture`, `TestClient` for the
+  API).
+- Run locally: see `README.md` for calibration → config → `run.py` steps.
+- Commit frequently, one logical change per commit, conventional-commit-style
+  subjects (`feat:`, `fix:`, `docs:`, `chore:`, `test:`).
+
+## Out of Scope Here
+
+- Website redesign and site publishing/export of catalogue data — separate
+  effort, contingent on the client's own timeline.
+- Checkout station and batch OCR/ISBN backfill — future phases, each gets
+  its own plan before implementation starts; don't build ahead of the
+  current phase's plan.
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