kit

Simspace Authoring kit

A Docker Sandboxes mixin kit that turns a sandbox into a Simspace authoring environment: the authoring skills, the guidance, the ports the preview needs, and the hosts the loop reaches.

$ sbx run claude --kit docker.io/dockersamples/simspace-authoring-kit:latest

More usually you don't type that at all — a repo generated from simspace-starter ships a .sbxenv.yaml that names this kit, so authors run:

$ sbx env run

Why it exists

The three authoring skills used to be committed into simspace-starter, which meant every repo generated from it froze the skills at the moment of generation. The Simspace format kept moving — slide decks, milestones, output pacing, deck import — and a lab repo created before any of those landed had an agent that had never heard of them. Only regenerating the repo fixed it, which nobody does.

Here the skills are versioned alongside the platform that defines the format, and re-resolved every time a sandbox is created. A lab repo from six months ago authors against today's Simspace.

What it ships

Skills	authoring-lab, authoring-slidedeck, importing-slidedeck, installed to ~/.claude/skills/
Agent instructions	Orientation, the authoring loop, and the rules that are easy to get wrong — written to kits-memory/simspace.md and indexed from the agent's memory file
Ports	5173 (live preview) and 8888 (pulse — presence, analytics, the instructor insights dashboard)
Network	Docker Hub, so the engine in the sandbox can pull the Simspace images; raw.githubusercontent.com / api.github.com / github.com, for sample-cli-output and the specs

Nothing is installed: the authoring toolchain is the prebuilt dockersamples/simspace-authoring image, run by docker compose inside the sandbox. The default sandbox templates carry a Docker engine, so that works with no extra setup.

The skills

• authoring-lab — sections, simulator.yaml scenarios, milestones, terminals, controls, seed files, and the labspace.yaml reference.
• authoring-slidedeck — kind: slides: layouts, the theme, speaker notes, fragments, the stat/card components, and the in-slide demo terminal.
• importing-slidedeck — converting a PowerPoint, Keynote, Google Slides or PDF deck into a Simspace deck by rebuilding each slide from its real structure rather than screenshotting it. Carries two stdlib-only Python inventory tools.

Versions

latest tracks main of dockersamples/simspace — which is the point, since staying current is what this kit is for. Released versions are published as vX.Y.Z for a workshop that needs a fixed target:

# .sbxenv.yaml
kits:
  - docker.io/dockersamples/simspace-authoring-kit:v1.0.0

Kits are applied when a sandbox is created. An existing sandbox keeps the skills it was built with — sbx env rm && sbx env run to pick up a newer kit.

Source

Built from kit/ in the Simspace repository, and published by its publish-kit.yml workflow.