Worked example: EEGLAB¶

EEGLAB (eeglab.org) is the honest hard case: a widely used toolbox in a language with no package registry and no docstring standard that an agent can lean on.

What EEGLAB is¶

EEGLAB is an open-source MATLAB toolbox from the Swartz Center for Computational Neuroscience (SCCN) for processing continuous and event-related electroencephalography (EEG), magnetoencephalography (MEG), and other electrophysiological data: filtering, artifact rejection, independent component analysis (ICA), time-frequency analysis, and group study. It has a graphical interface and a scripting interface, and a large plugin ecosystem.

Two archetypes apply:

• library / toolbox (the MATLAB code), and
• website (eeglab.org, the docs and tutorials).

The problem EEGLAB exposes¶

The library archetype leans on package metadata and typed docstrings. MATLAB has neither in the way Python or R do: no PyPI-style registry to publish a machine-readable card, and no numpydoc-style convention, just the leading help functionname comment block. So an agent writing an EEGLAB pipeline has little structured ground to stand on.

The fix: a bolt-on function manifest¶

Since MATLAB gives an agent nothing to enumerate, OSCAR's advice is to check one in: a machine-readable catalog of the functions that matter, their arguments, and a one-line purpose. See after/function-manifest.json, a starter covering the core pipeline (pop_loadset, pop_eegfiltnew, pop_runica, pop_epoch, eeg_checkset, pop_saveset). Generate it from the help blocks so it does not drift, and serve it from eeglab.org.

The rest, from the doctrine¶

• Discovery (website guide): a curated after/llms.txt for eeglab.org, server-rendered SoftwareApplication JSON-LD (after/eeglab.jsonld), and an AI-aware after/robots.txt.
• Usage (library guide): an after/AGENTS.md that shows how to run EEGLAB headless (eeglab nogui) and script the common pipeline, plus the function manifest as the machine-readable surface.

How it maps to the doctrine¶

• MATLAB toolboxes are called out in the library guide as needing exactly this bolt-on manifest.
• The website half is standard discovery: llms.txt, JSON-LD, robots.txt.
• EEGLAB sits in an ecosystem: link out to BIDS (the bids-matlab-tools plugin), HED for events, and NEMAR and OpenNeuro for datasets, so an agent can follow the graph.

Note¶

Files here are illustrative of the pattern. Facts are EEGLAB's real ones (the pop_ functions, the EEG structure, .set/.fdt files, sccn/eeglab, eeglab.org); fill the exact page URLs from the live site when adopting.