anvil

Ship features, not prompts.

anvil is the command line that turns "add a booking flow" into shipped code, tested, reviewed, and PR'd — across every repo your project touches. One CLI, one dashboard, one pipeline.

The 30-second tour

# 1. Set up your project (interactive — answers a handful of questions)
anvil init

# 2. Verify everything is wired up (Node, git, gh, providers, repos)
anvil doctor

# 3. Open the dashboard and drive features end-to-end
anvil dashboard

The dashboard handles the rest: clarification, requirements, implementation, validation, and shipping — across one or many repos in the same project.

What it does

anvil init

Scaffolds a project in seconds. Drops a factory.yaml describing your repos, languages, and build commands; installs the persona prompts that drive each pipeline stage; bootstraps ~/.anvil/models.yaml so the agent stack is ready to go. Optionally clones repos from GitHub for you. Run it once per project.

anvil doctor

A pre-flight check for the entire stack — Node version, git, gh auth, the Claude / Gemini CLIs, ~/.anvil/ layout, every repo listed in your factory.yaml, and which LLM providers are configured. Reads keys from process.env, ~/.anvil/.env, and ~/.anvil/auth.json so you see the real picture, not just shell state. Add --bootstrap-models to seed models.yaml and ollama pull anything missing.

anvil dashboard

The control plane. Boots a local HTTP + WebSocket server, opens the dashboard UI, and orchestrates pipelines:

• Clarify ambiguous requests with targeted questions
• Plan the work — files touched, contracts crossed, risks called out, cost estimated
• Build per-repo with the right model for each stage, with built-in retries, fallbacks, and a circuit breaker on flaky providers
• Validate with project-defined checks; auto-fix on failure
• Ship with branch creation, commits, and a PR per repo — cross-linked when the work spans multiple repos

Plus: change diffs, activity log, knowledge-base graph view, pipeline-policy editor, real-time cost ledger, settings UI for provider keys.

What ships in the box

• Three commands — init, doctor, dashboard — that's all you need today.
• The dashboard, bundled — a self-contained React + Vite frontend, served by the same process as the WebSocket backend. No extra installs.
• 15 persona prompts — battle-tested system prompts for clarifier, architect, engineer, tester, reviewer, security tester, and more. Copied to ~/.anvil/personas/ on init; edit any of them to retune your team's defaults.
• 6 project templates — TypeScript / Next.js, Go microservices, Python / FastAPI, Rust / Axum, Turborepo monorepo, Django + Celery. anvil init --template <name> for a non-interactive start.
• Default model registry — a models.yaml template with sensible per-tier choices (cheap, smart, agentic) ready to customize.

Why a CLI + dashboard, not just a CLI?

Because pipelines are easier to watch than to log.

The CLI handles setup, health checks, and launch — fast, scriptable, the right tool for one-shot work. The dashboard handles the live pipeline — every spawned agent, every diff, every cost cent, every PR — because that's a UI problem, not a stdout problem. Both share the same engine. Switch between them freely.

Configuration lives in two places

Everything except API keys is committable. Make Anvil yours.

Example configuration

Real, runnable examples for every config file live in examples/ at the repo root.

Project-level (factory.yaml)

• examples/typescript-monorepo/factory.yaml — Next.js + Express in one repo
• examples/go-microservices/factory.yaml — multi-service Go workspace
• examples/python-ml/factory.yaml — Python ML training + serving

Global (~/.anvil/)

• examples/anvil-home/.env.example — provider keys + opt-in observability
• examples/anvil-home/models.yaml — registry the resolver walks (local / cheap / premium tiers)
• examples/anvil-home/stage-policy.yaml — which tier handles which stage

Quick bootstrap from the examples:

cp examples/anvil-home/.env.example      ~/.anvil/.env  && chmod 600 ~/.anvil/.env
cp examples/anvil-home/models.yaml       ~/.anvil/models.yaml
cp examples/anvil-home/stage-policy.yaml ~/.anvil/stage-policy.yaml

models.yaml is also seeded automatically by anvil init (or anvil doctor --bootstrap-models). stage-policy.yaml overrides are full replacements, not merges — declare every stage you want supported. The resolver walks prefer left-to-right and picks the first model in models.yaml that matches the stage's capability and complexity_max.

Built on @anvil/* packages

The CLI is the front door. The work happens in:

• @anvil/agent-core — eight provider adapters, router, cost, telemetry
• @anvil/core-pipeline — stage definitions, routing, task envelopes
• @anvil/knowledge-core — codebase indexing, retrieval, graph
• @anvil/memory-core — long-running project memory + sleeptime consolidation
• @anvil/convention-core — convention learner

Use the CLI for the full experience, or import the cores directly if you're building your own front end.

Status

MVP 2 — the dashboard is the canonical interface for running pipelines. More CLI commands are on deck for direct scripting.

Part of Anvil — the AI development pipeline.