HiStruct Code Quest 🏗️
An onboarding program for engineers and AI agents who want to build in the HiStruct ecosystem.
HiStruct is a cloud platform for parametric structural engineering components. Engineers author calculation/geometry logic in FCS (FemCAD Script), and users interact with those components through a web UI — adjusting parameters, viewing 3D scenes, generating reports.
This repository is the comprehensive guide to becoming a productive contributor.
Who Is This For?
| Audience | What you'll learn |
|---|---|
| Software engineers | How to author FCS components, wire them into the platform, use the REST API |
| AI coding agents | Machine-readable patterns, CLI workflows, validation techniques |
| Structural engineers | How to turn your calculations into shareable, interactive web components |
Quick Start
- Hello World — Write your first FCS script, run it with
fli - First Component — Create an
.fcccomponent with 3D geometry, deploy to HiStruct
Documentation
Language & Scripting
- FCS Language Essentials — Syntax, types, lazy evaluation, lambdas
- Geometry Primitives — vertex/curve/area/volume/shell, layers, coordinate systems
Platform & Architecture
- Architecture Overview — FCS vs PVC duality, component lifecycle, spaces
- Component Structure — .fcc folder layout, manifests, parameter items
- REST API Reference — All endpoints for component lifecycle, evaluation, scene generation
Tooling
- FLI CLI Reference — All interpreter modes, flags, JSON REPL
- Booster Setup — Local compute node installation and configuration
Patterns & Recipes
- REST Integration — Call external APIs from FCS (RestClient, InitByGet triggers)
- Constraint Execution — Sequential vs batch constraints, VariableScope, multi-step pipelines
- Component Edit API — Programmatic property updates, load-properties/update-properties transaction flow
- Configurator Patterns — gblock/gclass, distributions, conditional geometry
- Parameter UI — ItemDouble, ItemList, ItemAction, ItemComment, galleries
Gotchas & Pitfalls
- All Gotchas — 19+ battle-tested pitfalls with causes and fixes
- Agent-Specific Mistakes — Common errors AI agents make
Reference
- Knowledge Base Index — Index of 25 official FCS knowledge base documents
- Worked Examples — Annotated real-world components
- Glossary — FCS, PVC, FCC, Booster, fli, and all the acronyms
The Vision
This isn't just documentation — it's a quest system. The goal is to make it possible for any engineer or AI agent to:
- Set up a local dev environment in under 30 minutes
- Create and deploy a working parametric component in under 2 hours
- Integrate external services (REST APIs, ML models) into components
- Understand the full platform architecture well enough to debug issues independently
Each section is designed to be self-contained and actionable. No hand-waving. Every pattern has been validated by an AI agent going through the actual process, hitting real bugs, and documenting the solutions.
Built with knowledge extracted from real development sessions on the MapScan/Skynet project, 2026.