There Is No App (TINA)

TINA is a specification for applications whose program is text and whose runtime is an LLM coding agent. A TINA is just a folder: no installer, no interface, no server. You hand the folder to an agent (Claude Code, Gemini CLI, or any agent that can read and write files), say "start", and the agent runs the app by reading the text inside.

This repository holds the specification itself.

Contents

• TINA-SPEC-0.1.md — TINA Spec v0.1 (Draft). Defines:
  • the workspace format: AGENTS.md as the sole entry point, its front matter and required sections, sub-workspaces, the human-facing README;
  • the protocol invariants (I1–I7): the canonical English block that every TINA embeds verbatim in its AGENTS.md;
  • conformance for workspaces and for runtime behavior;
  • what the spec deliberately leaves unspecified.

Status

Version 0.1 is a draft. It keeps its draft marker until Meta TINA has built a first real application from it and that application has run end to end.

Related

• Meta TINA — the reference application: a TINA that interviews domain experts and produces new TINAs. Its app/spec/ directory carries the same spec text; the two copies are kept identical.

Versioning

Each spec version is one file, TINA-SPEC-<version>.md. The protocol invariants block inside it is versioned with the spec and must never be edited in place; a change to the invariants is a new spec version.