What is NAPL

NAPL asks one question: what if the prompt was the source code?

You don't write code. You write what you mean, in English, in a .napl file:

The example above is live. The prompt on the left is editable, with the CLI's own validator squiggling errors as you type; the code on the right is what napl gen typescript actually produced from it. Try deleting the module: line and watch the validator object before any CLI ever runs.

What the toolchain does that a chat window doesn't

Anyone can ask a model for code. The problem is everything after: the chat scrolls away, the code stays, and nobody remembers why any line exists. NAPL inverts that. When you run napl gen <target>, a coding agent:

• writes a real project and iterates until the tests you declared pass: the tests are data in the prompt's frontmatter, not an afterthought;
• maps every sentence to the exact lines that implement it. Hover a sentence in the example above to see them. If the agent can't prove that mapping, the build fails: attribution is a hard gate, not a nicety;
• locks the result read-only. Edit the generated code by hand and napl status reports drift and exits non-zero, so your CI catches it.

The English stays the source of truth. The code becomes a build artifact: inspectable, tested, traceable, never hand-edited. To change behavior, you change the prompt.

The compile is a dialogue

Gen doesn't only emit code. The model writes back into the margin of your prompt (a .mapl file per module) flagging where your words were unclear (ambiguity, a red squiggle), what it decided that you left open (assumption), and why the code came out as it did (note). A prompt change that produces no code change must say why, or the gen fails: silence is forbidden. Ambiguity becomes a first-class compile diagnostic, the way a type error is.