Genie Mode is a floating design cockpit that appears when you run filepress dev. It helps you steer Essay tokens, try stock or uploaded backgrounds, and activate versioned experiments under .filepress-genie/ — then bake the winners into theme.css, static/, and filepress.config.ts.

Rules of the road

  • Dev only. Genie mounts when import.meta.env.DEV (optional FILEPRESS_GENIE=1). It is absent from filepress preview, filepress build, and adapter-static output.
  • Markdown stays sacred. Genie does not become a CMS. Posts remain plain files in git.
  • Bake to commit. Experiments live in gitignored .filepress-genie/. What you commit is the active theme/config/static tree.

Local models

Genie and import share the same Ollama hooks:

EnvRole
FILEPRESS_OLLAMA_MODELModel name (e.g. a Finetuna-tuned tag)
OLLAMA_HOSTRemote Ollama if not local

If Ollama is reachable but no suitable model is present, Genie suggests pulling a default and points at Finetuna for tuned local models. Finetuna is companion tooling — not a hard dependency of FilePress.

What Genie mutates today

Theme tokens and limited config surfaces (lede, tagline, logo, hero background) via steers, Openverse stock, and local upload. Live inspire crawl + richer Ollama refine are on the roadmap (Genie M2).

Spec: docs/GENIE_MODE_SPEC.md.