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Capy for everyone

You don't need to be a programmer to use Capy. If you've ever wanted to keep a list of recipes / events / plans / anything in a format that turns into something polished — Capy is built for that.

What you write looks like writing

Compare these two ways of making a recipe card.

The old way — open a recipe-website editor, click through 12 form fields, fight with rich-text formatting, get a result that doesn't look quite right.

The Capy way — type this:

recipe "Lemon olive oil cake"
    serves 8
    time "45 minutes"

    ingredient "all-purpose flour"   "1 1/2 cups"
    ingredient "olive oil"           "3/4 cup"
    ingredient "sugar"               "1 cup"

    step "Preheat oven to 350F."
    step "Whisk flour and sugar."
    step "Add oil and lemon zest."
    step "Bake for 35-40 minutes."

    tip "Glaze with powdered sugar and lemon juice."
end

Then run one command and get a beautiful HTML recipe card you can print, email, or paste into a blog.

The full vocabulary, on one page

The recipe DSL above has exactly six words:

Word Means
recipe Start a new recipe with a title.
serves How many people it serves.
time How long it takes.
ingredient One ingredient: name and quantity.
step One step in the method.
tip A bonus suggestion.
end End of the recipe.

That's the whole language for recipes. Anyone — a teenager learning to cook, a grandparent typing up family favorites, a food blogger — can use it within five minutes.

Four ready-made vocabularies

The four animated demos on the home page each have a similar tiny vocabulary tailored to a real-world task:

Demo What you describe What you get
Recipe card A recipe in 5–10 lines A polished HTML recipe with two-column ingredient list and highlighted tip
Event invitation A party invite in 8–10 lines A printable pastel HTML invite with RSVP info
Weekly meal plan Seven dinners + notes A clean green-and-white HTML grid to tape to the fridge
Reading log A child's books + page counts A bright HTML certificate with a progress bar and star ratings

Each one has a "library" — a small file that defines the vocabulary and the visual design. The library is reusable: write 100 recipes against the same library, they all look beautiful, and restyling them all is a 5-minute edit in one place.

Where libraries come from

Three options, in order of effort:

  1. Use a ready-made one. The repo has 50+ libraries for common tasks. Drop in your content, run capy run, done.
  2. Ask an AI to make one. Describe what you want — "I want to write party invitations with a 1950s diner theme" — and Claude / ChatGPT / any modern AI will draft a Capy library in a couple of minutes. See for AI agents.
  3. Write your own. A typical library is 30–100 lines and looks like the recipe library above. Worth learning if you want full control. See library authoring.

What Capy is not

  • Not a website builder. It produces files (HTML, Markdown, text) that you put wherever you want.
  • Not a no-code platform that locks you in. The output is yours — plain files, no proprietary format, no monthly subscription.
  • Not magic. If your library doesn't have a step keyword, you can't write step ... and expect it to work. The vocabulary is whatever the library author put in.

A 5-minute setup

# 1. Install (one-time, no admin permissions needed)
go install github.com/olivierdevelops/capy/cmd/capy@latest

# 2. Clone the samples
git clone https://github.com/olivierdevelops/capy
cd capy/samples/recipe-card

# 3. Edit script.capy in any text editor — replace with your recipe
# 4. Run
capy run lib.capy script.capy > my-recipe.html
open my-recipe.html

That's it. The same five steps work for every other sample — substitute event-invite/, weekly-meal-plan/, reading-log/, or any of the 50+ samples in the samples/ directory.

When Capy is overkill

If you'll only ever make ONE recipe / ONE invite / ONE plan, just open a Word doc. Capy pays off when you'll make many of something that should look the same — fridge magnets for every week of the year, party invites that all match the family aesthetic, a yearly reading log for each child.

That repetition is where every "I should automate this" thought comes from. Capy is the easiest way to actually do it.