The Contributor's path

Every deck here is an open grammar anyone can correct, translate, or extend. Climb in by the gentlest route that suits you.

Read · the contributor's guide

Contribute to existing decks — or create your own

Fix a card, add a deck or a spread, write a course, or improve the site itself — by whatever route suits you, from a one-click edit in the app to full code. The deep guide walks every path.

Four ways to contribute — pick one

Creation-first · the gentlest route at the top

Path	What you do	Start
1In the app recursive.eco · no code	Click through any card and propose a change — even without AI. The pencil icon opens it in the Create editor to propose your fix; or just ask the Grammar Assistant to make the edit for you.	Edit a card now →
2On GitHub web · a browser	Edit the deck's JSON in GitHub's web editor and open a pull request — no other tools needed.	Open the repo →
3In Claude.ai chat · MCP recommended	Draft bigger edits in a chat, then open the PR. We recommend connecting the recursive.eco MCP so Claude can act on your library directly.	Read the steps →
4Fork & code Claude Code Desktop + MCP	Clone the repo and edit like any coder — best with Claude Code Desktop + the MCP, working the whole library at once.	Read the steps →

From path 2 on, the same moves let you edit any part of this site — and they're the very skills you'd use to grow a library of your own. (We're building easier on-ramps for that; more soon.)

What you'd be tending

The open library, in its actual viewers

Browse · every card

The card library

Two dozen historical decks, card by card — the Symbol and Research notes you'd correct or translate.

Pivot · every angle

The Emergence Explorer

Drag fields to regroup every card — the patterns a well-tended grammar makes possible.

Build · cast · send

The Spread Studio

Build a spread, cast it, and send the reading to recursive.eco for an AI interpretation.

Read · a course

The courses

Every course is Markdown — and now a grammar too. Write a new one, or fix a single line.

The Wish List

What's on the workbench right now, and what we'd like done before launch — a living list, and a menu of things a contributor could pick up.

On the workbench Before launch Done

On the workbench

What we're actively building

Flagship · a course that is a grammar

A history course, rendered straight from a grammar

"A History of Tarot" began as a single writing file. We taught the library to read it as a grammar — the same open format as every deck — so the course can be edited, forked, and previewed like anything else in the collection.

How it's made

The course was written as Markdown, then converted once (Oct 23 2026) into a normal grammar: each section a lesson, each video its own node, the diagrams saved as pictures.
The grammar is now the course: tarot/history-of-tarot-course/grammar.json, edited in the app or in the file like any deck.
recursive.eco reads it in Play's Continuous view, top to bottom.

The wish behind it

recursive.eco's Library Assistant can already open a course — but it can't see what's inside. A grammar it can read. Because the course is now a grammar, the assistant could answer questions about the actual content, not just point at the page.

Read it in recursive.eco →

On the workbench

Sync that never loses work

Making the recursive.eco ↔ GitHub collection-sync non-destructive: keep every repo-only field, hold a stable key order, so a sync proposal is small and reviewable instead of a 26,000-line wall.

On the workbench

Every grammar, every view

The Views menu should flip any grammar — deck, course, or guide — through Cards, Course, Explorer, Tree and Timeline without a broken view. Course view was the last gap; it now renders at parity.

Read the guide in recursive.eco →

On the workbench

A new logo — emergence, not just iteration

The spiral captures iteration; we want a mark that also captures emergence and a more tree-like view — think a heart that falls, roots, and grows a whole forest. Drafts in progress.

See the logo studies →

Before launch

What we want done first

Before launch

Fix sync before resolving drifts

Don't merge the "resolve all drifts" pull requests until the roundtrip preserves repo-only fields — otherwise it strips licence blocks and enrichment from decks that look unchanged.

Before launch

Let the assistant read course grammars

Wire recursive.eco's Library Assistant to read a course's grammar content, so it can actually discuss the history, not just open the course page.

Before launch

Publish the course grammar

Offer "A History of Tarot" as a public, community-editable grammar on recursive.eco — the same path every deck takes.

Before launch

One last legibility pass

Walk every page and viewer in light only, confirm nothing is light-on-light, and finish the museum-restyle tokens on the remaining viewers.

Before launch

Provenance you can trust

Confirm every card image is public domain or openly licensed, credited to its source, and every interpretive claim stays inside its source tradition — the floor the whole library stands on.

Done

Course-as-a-grammar renders at parity

The grammar version of the history course now shows the deck chapters, suit and trump galleries, maker bios and live maps — identical to the written course.

Open it →

This list lives in the open repo like everything else — see something missing? Open an issue or a pull request ↗.