Ghost Library¶
Term coined on Twitter for the distribution pattern openai-frontier used with symphony: publish the spec, not the implementation, and let a coding agent re-derive the library locally inside the consumer's codebase.
Ryan Lopopolo on the workflow: take the scaffolding that existed in a proprietary repo, spin up a new empty repo, point Codex at the old one as a reference, and ask it to rewrite the scaffolding with only what's needed for a coding agent to reassemble it. Consumers get an .md-grade spec, not a vendored blob. The agent is the package manager.
Why it matters¶
- Specs are much cheaper to share than implementations — and they port cleanly across languages (Elixir reference, but the same spec can be re-derived in TypeScript or Rust).
- Solves "software dependencies are going away" in Brett Taylor's phrasing — the code isn't a dependency, the behavior is. You still pay Datadog or Temporal; you stop paying npm-level dependency rot.
- A concrete instance of code-is-free at the distribution layer: if generating the library is cheap, shipping 10k lines of Markdown spec beats shipping 10k lines of versioned TypeScript.