`antora serve` was declined. We shipped it anyway.

Authors do not preview Antora sites one file at a time. They preview the composed multi-repo site — the thing Antora exists to build. IDE AsciiDoc preview and gulp reload of a UI bundle do not replace that loop. Upstream preferred an unimplemented CLI plugin system over a small serve command in core. Fair enough. The need did not vanish with the decision.

@antora-supplemental/serve is the standalone answer: generate, serve, watch local sources, live-reload. Peer dependency on Antora. No fork of the generator. Point it at your playbook and work.

Full rebuilds on every save get expensive. Pair serve with @antora-supplemental/incremental and you get a dependency manifest, a dirty-set CLI, and partial reconvert: pages outside the dirty set reuse prior HTML when they can. Playbook, UI, or antora.yml changes still force a full convert. That is the correct safety valve.

Status is honest: v0.1, local watch and live reload. Remote git content sources are not polled. The architecture write-up lives on the docs hub under site rebuild (v1/v2). Read that before inventing a second pipeline.

Core declined the command. Docs authors still need it. Shipping it here is not defiance — it is the supplemental charter working as advertised.