In NoGlyph the visible source can be completely blank. The program is a canonical set of constraints, generation rules, capabilities and dependencies; a deterministic resolver turns it into a program graph, and a conventional compiler builds what that graph lowers to.
Blank surface ≠ program encoding. NoGlyph is not a Whitespace-style language: spaces, tabs and newlines are not opcodes.
Intent, candidate edits, canonical constraints, the resolved program, its views, the lowered code and the native executable are kept apart, so each step can be inspected and checked on its own.
The canonical program lives in constraints, not in a text file. Blank, graph, debug and generated-C views are projections of the same program, and changing only the blank surface changes neither the program graph nor its hash.
The same constraints always resolve to the same graph and hash. Equal-priority conflicts are rejected, undeclared capabilities fail closed, every build records its provenance, and a separate lock pins the chain from constraints to backend artifact so a build can be verified against it.
NoGlyph adds a semantic, generative front end above existing toolchains. Its backend emits C11 for a GCC- or Clang-style compiler; it does not replace them.
AI-assisted authoring produces candidate patches only. Their semantic diff, validation and lock impact are shown, and nothing becomes canonical without an explicit author commit.
Each arrow is a separate, recorded step. The blank view sits beside the pipeline, never inside it.
The reference implementation covers MVP-0 through MVP-7. It is local-first and claims nothing beyond its validation ledger.