cclaw

A harness-first flow toolkit for coding agents. cclaw wraps each /cc <task> in a small opinionated loop — triage, optionally co-design, plan with AC, build with TDD, review, ship — running inside Claude Code, Cursor, OpenCode, or Codex. Under 1 KLOC of orchestrator runtime; everything else lives as on-disk Markdown the agent reads on demand.

Install

Requirements: Node.js 20+ and a git project.

cd /path/to/your/repo
npx cclaw-cli@latest                                              # interactive TUI menu
npx cclaw-cli --non-interactive install --harness=claude,cursor   # CI / scripts: explicit

Running npx cclaw-cli@latest with no args opens a top-level menu — Install / Sync / Upgrade / Uninstall / Browse knowledge / Show version / Quit — with a smart default (Install when no .cclaw/, Sync when there is one). For CI use --non-interactive <command>; bare cclaw init / cclaw sync were dropped in v8.29 and point at the TUI. Install is idempotent and auto-detects existing harnesses from .claude/, .cursor/, .opencode/, .codex/ markers when no --harness= is passed.

Three slash commands then become available in your harness:

• /cc <task> — start a new flow, or resume the active one
• /cc-cancel — abandon the active flow (artifacts move to .cclaw/flows/cancelled/<slug>/)
• /cc-idea — drop a half-formed idea into .cclaw/ideas.md without starting a flow

Flow control (plan, build, review, ship) intentionally does not live in the CLI — it is the orchestrator's job inside the harness.

The four-stage flow

/cc <task> runs a triage gate, picks a path, and then dispatches one stage at a time:

Every stage is a fresh sub-agent dispatch that reads its own contract from .cclaw/lib/agents/<id>.md, writes one artifact under .cclaw/flows/<slug>/, and returns a six-line summary with an explicit Confidence: high | medium | low line. The orchestrator chains, pauses, or loops back to a fix-only iteration based on that summary.

Build is a TDD cycle. In strict mode every Acceptance Criterion goes RED → GREEN → REFACTOR with one commit per phase, using posture-driven subject prefixes (red(AC-N): ... / green(AC-N): ... / refactor(AC-N): ...). The reviewer reads git log --grep="(AC-N):" at handoff and at ship to verify the chain. Soft mode runs the cycle once for the whole feature with a plain git commit; inline skips it.

When ac-author declares topology parallel-build (≥4 AC across ≥2 disjoint touch surfaces, every AC parallelSafe: true), strict-mode build fans out into git worktrees — capped at five slices, never split into "wave 2". Integration review reads each branch before the orchestrator merges. Harnesses without sub-agent dispatch fall back to inline-sequential with an explicit user accept-fallback step.

What makes it different

• Cross-flow memory is a closed loop. Every shipped slug appends a deduped entry to .cclaw/state/knowledge.jsonl. The next /cc reads it at triage, surfaces the top three nearby slugs as triage.priorLearnings, and feeds them to design, ac-author, and reviewer as context. cclaw --non-interactive knowledge (or the TUI's "Browse knowledge") lists the catalogue.
• Stage-windowed skill loading. A build dispatch sees only the skills tagged for build; a review dispatch sees only the skills tagged for review. Seventeen skills live on disk, but each specialist sees its slice.
• Calibrated confidence is a routing signal. Confidence: low is a hard pause even in autopilot. Confidence: medium requires a Notes: line. The orchestrator routes on the calibration, not on its own memory of the dispatch.

Specialists

Five on-demand specialists plus two read-only research helpers:

Strict-mode review additionally runs an adversarial pre-mortem pass at ship gate. An unresolved severity=required + axis=architecture finding blocks ship across every AC mode until the user explicitly accepts.

Each prompt is 200-600 lines with an output schema, worked examples, and hard rules. After install they live at .cclaw/lib/agents/*.md (shared) and mirrored under your harness's agents directory.

CLI

cclaw                                          # open the TUI menu (interactive default)
cclaw --version | --help                       # version / help flags
cclaw --non-interactive install                # CI: install / reapply assets (idempotent + orphan cleanup)
cclaw --non-interactive knowledge              # CI: list captured learnings (--tag, --surface, --json, --all)
cclaw --non-interactive uninstall              # CI: remove cclaw assets
cclaw --non-interactive version | help         # CI: print version / help and exit

--non-interactive is the CI / scripts escape hatch — bare cclaw init / cclaw sync etc. error in v8.29 and point at the TUI. The non-interactive surface is five commands: install, knowledge, uninstall, version, help. --non-interactive install is the single idempotent installer — calling it on an already-installed project re-applies cclaw assets and runs orphan cleanup, which is what --non-interactive sync / --non-interactive upgrade did before v8.37; those names exit 1 with a migration hint pointing at install. The TUI menu keeps its Sync / Upgrade rows so a human reading the menu sees the right intent. --non-interactive knowledge is the read-side of the compound loop; it groups entries by tag, sorts by recency, and accepts --tag=<tag> / --surface=<substring> filters or --json for piping into jq.

AC traceability via per-AC commit prefixes (v8.40+)

In strict mode, every commit during /cc carries a posture-driven subject-line prefix that the reviewer reads at handoff time:

git add tests/path/to/new.test.ts
git commit -m "red(AC-1): tooltip shows email when permission set"

git add src/path/to/implementation.ts
git commit -m "green(AC-1): hasViewEmail check + branch in tooltip"

git add src/path/to/implementation.ts
git commit -m "refactor(AC-1): extract hasViewEmail to permissions.ts"

The reviewer runs git log --grep="(AC-N):" --oneline against the plan's AC list and verifies the per-posture sequence (red before green for test-first; just refactor(AC-N): ... for refactor-only; etc.). Missing or mis-ordered commits land as A-1 findings (severity required, axis correctness). Soft and inline modes use plain git commit without the AC prefix.

This is a prompt-only contract — there is no .cclaw/hooks/ directory, no commit-helper.mjs, no mechanical pre-commit gate. cclaw v8.40 retired the hook in favour of the obra-superpowers / mattpocock / addy pattern: the discipline lives in the prompt, and the reviewer's ex-post inspection is the gate.

Compound learnings (automatic, gated)

After ship, cclaw checks whether the run produced something worth remembering — a non-trivial decision was recorded by design or ac-author, review needed three or more iterations, a security review ran, or the user asked to capture. If yes, flows/<slug>/learnings.md is written and one deduped line is appended to .cclaw/state/knowledge.jsonl. If no, silently skipped so the index stays signal-rich. Every fifth capture triggers a knowledge-refresh pass (dedup / consolidate / supersede) so the index does not bloat.

When to use cclaw, and when not to

cclaw is opinionated: discovery on risky work, planning, TDD-enforced builds, multi-iteration review, ship gate, automatic compounding. The price is process — even a small task pays for one triage ask.

• Reach for cclaw when you want a structured loop with cross-flow memory and a real review pass on every shipped change, especially on a codebase you will come back to next week.
• Reach for something lighter (a vanilla CLAUDE.md, andrej-karpathy-skills) for one-off edits, throwaway prototypes, or scripts where ceremony costs more than it returns.
• Reach for a broader harness (gstack, superpowers) for browser-driven QA, design generation, parallel-sprint workflows, or a much larger specialist catalogue. cclaw's small surface is intentional; it is not trying to replace those.

More

• CHANGELOG.md — full release history (v8.0 onward; v7→v8 migration notes at the bottom)
• .cclaw/lib/skills/*.md after install — the seventeen auto-trigger skills + cclaw-meta, each with its trigger and depth sections
• .cclaw/config.yaml after install — harness selection + opt-in flags

License

MIT — see LICENSE. Contributions welcome.