The naming
The cast.
Cratis names capabilities after telling and understanding a story — because that is what an information system does. Something happened. Something recorded it. Someone needs to explain it later.
The open runtime
Chronicle, Arc, Components and the open Workbench, CLI and MCP operating surfaces.
The paid design product
Collaborative modeling, executable preview and runtime understanding, at honest preview maturity.
The expertise
Founder-led support, review, first slices, production readiness, and workshops, with scope and availability set by each plan or engagement.
These are the three offers. The names below are the cast of capabilities inside them, not separate products a customer must assemble.
Prologue — what the existing system already did
Prologue is an emerging brownfield aid intended to observe selected system behavior and help teams draft an event model. Verify current inputs, data handling, and output coverage before use.
Studio — the storyboard
Where the team maps out what happens: the commands people issue, the events those produce, the read models people look at. On one canvas, in real time, before anyone commits to an implementation.
Screenplay — the script
One declarative .play file describing a whole
bounded context. Declarative first, with an escape hatch into
real code where you need it.
Stage — the performance
Stage can perform supported parts of a Screenplay model in a live sandbox. It is useful for exploration at Preview maturity; it is not the production application or a no-drift guarantee.
Scene — the set design
Describing a user interface without describing a platform. Scene is the UI model of the model-first layer — experimental, like the rest of that layer, and named that way on purpose.
Arc — the plot
The shape the story takes: commands in, events out, queries back — typed all the way to the screen.
Chronicle — the record
Durable facts kept in order, with explicit compliance and retention operations where the application requires them.
Narrator — reading it back
A VS Code surface for supported Chronicle inspection workflows. Check its current repository and documentation before adoption.
Lens — the viewfinder
A browser extension for supported development and testing workflows involving identities, tenants, and commands. Its current scope varies with the target application.
Synopsis — the program notes
Turns the executable examples scattered through a repository into the clearest account of what the system actually promises. The source proves it; Synopsis makes it readable.
Fundamentals — the stagecraft
The shared building blocks beneath the rest of the cast — concepts, serialization, dependency injection, and type discovery for .NET and TypeScript. Not glamorous; load-bearing.
Workbench, CLI and MCP — the operating surfaces
Workbench, CLI, and MCP provide open operating surfaces for supported Chronicle workflows. Capability and maturity vary by tool and version; Studio and Assurance are not intended to gate Build's available inspection features.
Prompter — the documentation guide
Answers Cratis questions on Discord in seconds, grounded in the docs, with citations — and says so plainly when it doesn't know. That honesty is the feature.
Ensemble — coming soon
Deterministic expert workflows for AI agents building with the Cratis stack. Free and MIT licensed, and strictly pre-release: the runtime is not implemented yet, so "coming soon" is the whole claim.
The metaphor isn't decoration.
The file extension is .play. Stage can interpret
supported model behavior in a sandbox rather than generating a
production application. The names still read as a useful sentence:
Prologue captures the backstory, Studio storyboards it, Screenplay writes it down, Stage performs it, Chronicle records it, Narrator reads it back, Synopsis tells you what it promised.