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Introducing Archetect 3

· 2 min read
Jimmie Fulton
Jimmie Fulton
Chief Architect, Ybor.ai

Archetect 3 is the biggest release in the project's history: a ground-up refinement of how archetypes are scripted, templated, and composed — while staying true to what Archetect has always been: a flexible, powerful, and blazingly fast code generator.

Lua is the new scripting engine​

Archetype scripts are now written in Lua, one of the most widely known and battle-tested embedded languages in the world. Compared to Archetect 2's scripting engine, this brings:

  • Real IDE support — full autocomplete, hover docs, and error detection through the Lua Language Server. Archetect ships type annotations for its entire scripting API; a single archetect ide setup wires up your editor.
  • A language you may already know — Lua powers Neovim, Redis, game engines, and countless embedded systems. There's a good chance you've written some, and if you haven't, it's famously easy to pick up.
  • Loud failures instead of silent ones — typos in scripts produce clear errors with stack traces, rather than silently generating the wrong thing.

A minimal archetype script looks like this:

local ctx = Context.new()

ctx:prompt_text("Project Name:", "project-name", {
  cases = Cases.programming(),
})

directory.render("templates", ctx)

ATL: a purpose-built template engine​

Templates are rendered with the Archetect Template Language (ATL) — a Jinja2-style engine with first-class support for the things code generators actually need: a full suite of casing filters (snake_case, PascalCase, kebab-case, and friends), smart pluralization and singularization, and filters and functions that can be used interchangeably.

Composable catalogs and libraries​

Catalogs — Archetect's distributed menu system for organizing archetypes — are now declarative and composable. Archetypes can be mounted as libraries, sharing Lua modules and template fragments across an entire organization's archetype ecosystem, and catalog entries can carry pre-configured answers and switches.

And more​

  • Interactive full-text catalog search (archetect search)
  • First-class headless/CI operation with typed answers and answer files
  • An MCP server (archetect mcp) so AI tools can drive generation
  • Client/server modes for running Archetect across a network

Head over to Getting Started to install Archetect 3 and generate your first project, or dive into the Reference for the full CLI and Lua API documentation.