docflow

docflow

A plugin for ADR-driven, documentation-led projects, working on Claude Code, Claude Cowork, pi, Codex, and OpenCode from the same skill files (see Install). It installs a bootstrap skill that scaffolds (or retrofits) an Architecture Decision Record (ADR) catalogue, a plan queue, and AGENTS.md conventions into any repository, plus a set of lifecycle skills that author, queue, ship, and audit ADRs — so the project can be driven by both humans and coding agents from a small set of canonical files. For the formal definition of the conventions — why they help and where they fall short — see the methodology.

Skills

Slash commands below are the Claude Code form. On the pi coding agent the same skills are invoked as /skill:<name> (e.g. /skill:bootstrap, /skill:new-adr). See Install.

Skill	Slash command	Purpose
bootstrap	/bootstrap	Scaffold or retrofit the whole convention set. Start here.
new-adr	/new-adr	Author one ADR — next contiguous number, right shape, INDEX + domain wiring, supersede linkage.
new-plan	/new-plan	Add a plan/todo item tracing to its owning ADR(s).
ship-item	/ship-item	Run the completion event: verify → completion commit (todo→done, ADR Accepted→Implemented, INDEX) → push or PR merge per the recorded model.
add-convention	/add-convention	Assess whether a convention is worth codifying, route it to the right home (or to an ADR), then add it. Use it to enable optional practices (e.g. TDD) on demand — see USAGE §5a.
audit	/audit	Lint the repo against its own conventions — numbering, INDEX sync, plan coverage, ADR-privacy leaks, more.
brainstorm	/brainstorm	Decompose a problem into candidate ADRs + plan items (proposes drafts; writes nothing until approved).
agent-wave	/agent-wave	Run a bounded queue wave using available parallel agents or sequential execution, with checkpoint or continuous supervision.
rollup	/rollup	For a multi-repo product: aggregate every member repo's ADRs into one derived, product-wide roll-up (run from the home repo).

The lifecycle skills all read CONVENTIONS.md first and honour the choices the bootstrap recorded (ADR shape, status lifecycle, integration model, multi-agent mode). They refuse to run on an un-bootstrapped repo and point you at /bootstrap.

What /bootstrap installs

Only the core is always written; everything else is an opt-in layer chosen during the assessment, so a minimal repo stays as light as a classic ADR catalogue.

Core (always):

• AGENTS.md — hard rules for coding agents (the entry point).
• CLAUDE.md — one-liner re-exporting AGENTS.md so Claude Code picks it up automatically.
• CONVENTIONS.md — authoring rules for ADRs, naming, status lifecycle, audit trail, and git contract.
• INDEX.md — generated table of all ADRs.
• adr/0000-template.md — the ADR template; the catalogue starts here.

Optional layers (opt-in):

• plan/todo/ + plan/done/ — the implementation queue (Q4a). Git history and plan/done/ are the shipped record: direct-to-main footers name the HEAD SHA, while PR-based footers name the pull request.
• _agent/ — the agent operating contract: who writes what, the one real mutex, and how an unattended run behaves. It holds nothing git already records. Members follow the coordination answer (Q5): a single writer gets prompts/autonomous.md, and only where a verify gate (Q8) and the plan/todo/ queue the prompt walks (Q4a) are both recorded — otherwise no _agent/ at all; a shared checkout gets ROLES.md, LOCKS.md, and the prompt on the same condition; separate worktrees get ROLES.md and the prompt on the same condition. No mode writes a dashboard of what is in flight: a queue item is claimed by pushing a branch named for it (claim/<item-key>) and, where integration is PR-based, a draft pull request, and the live set is read back from the worktrees, those branches and those PRs.
• domains/<slug>/README.md — grouping: per-area indexes (e.g. domains/auth/) over the flat catalogue, for navigating a large catalogue by area. Organisational only — ADRs keep their number; new-adr files each under its domain. Enable it when the project has distinct areas (Q7).
• GLOSSARY.md, the technology-ADR template (adr/0000-template-technology.md — the second ADR shape, chosen at Q2 and declared per ADR by a shape: metadata field rather than by a number range), and project-specific hard rules (vendor-naming, regulated evidence, language mandate, audit-stream separation) — Q2/Q7/Q10.

Omitting any optional layer leaves a valid repo; a lifecycle skill that needs an absent layer refuses cleanly and says what's missing.

Enable a deferred layer later: re-run bootstrap on the repo — it detects your existing setup, skips the settled questions, and offers only the optional layers you don't have yet, adding the chosen ones by merge. (Two shortcuts: add-convention creates GLOSSARY.md on your first shared term, and new-adr offers to create a domains/<slug>/ grouping when you file an ADR under a new domain.)

On an older number-range catalogue? Early two-shape repos encoded the shape in the number — a cutoff in CONVENTIONS.md, a technology template at the boundary (adr/0100-template.md or your own number), technology records above it. That still works: audit recognises it, keeps checking it by its own range rules, and reports it as a single non-failing "migration available" note. Accept the offer (from audit or a bootstrap re-run) and the move is mechanical: your technology records are renumbered onto the end of the sequence in their original order, capability numbers stay put, shape: is written on every record, every in-repo reference follows, the boundary template is retired, and it lands as one commit listing every old-to-new pair. You see that map and confirm it before anything is written — and declining is a perfectly good answer.

Placement: AGENTS.md and CLAUDE.md always stay at the repository root; everything else lives under a configurable artefact root — .docflow/ (the default), docs/, or the repo root — chosen at bootstrap and recorded in CONVENTIONS.md. Discovery is deterministic for tools (the same pattern as git's .git): a .docflow/ directory is the root; any other choice gets a one-line .docflow pointer file at the repo root (root: docs/), written by bootstrap.

Seed ADR: by default, bootstrap also writes adr/0001 — a first ADR recording the decision to adopt this method (self-documenting, like the classic "use ADRs" convention). It references CONVENTIONS.md for the rules and is created Implemented. Decline it at sign-off if you want only the template.

Why

Documentation-led projects rot when conventions live in someone's head. This plugin makes the conventions explicit, machine-readable, and applied uniformly — so a fresh contributor (human or agent) can pick up the repo with no oral handover.

It works equally well on fresh repos (scaffolds from zero) and on existing repos (retrofits, preserving and merging existing files rather than overwriting them).

Multi-repo products

A single product spread across several repositories can run as a federation. At bootstrap a repo declares whether it is standalone or part of a multi-repo product, and whether it is establishing a new federation or joining one — a joining repo only ever writes its own back-pointer, never into another repo. You pick a topology (central decisions repo · distributed · home-repo-plus-local), and the convention set keeps numbering contiguous per repo while a federation-wide identity is the cross-repo key. The rollup skill aggregates every member's catalogue into one product-wide view, and audit gains cross-repo checks (membership, identity collisions, dangling references, roll-up drift, convention drift). Work and status cross repos the same way: a cross-repo decision is one plan item per affected repo, and its aggregate status ("2 of 3 repos") surfaces in the roll-up. No tool writes across a repo boundary; consistency is declared at the edges and enforced by audit. See the methodology for the full model.

No drafts in the catalogue

docflow records outcomes, not work-in-progress. There is no Draft status and no brainstorming/ folder — an ADR's first persisted status is Proposed, created only once a decision is approved. The brainstorm skill explores candidates in conversation and writes nothing until you approve them; only then does new-adr mint a numbered ADR. This keeps the catalogue free of half-formed drafts and the numbering clean — numbers go only to real decisions — following the lightweight-ADR tradition that an ADR captures the agreed decision, not the discussion that produced it.

Install

docflow ships from one skill source (plugins/docflow/skills/) to five coding agents — only the packaging differs. Two surfaces: the scaffolded output (AGENTS.md, the ADR catalogue, plan/, _agent/) is plain Markdown read natively by any agent that loads AGENTS.md; the skills are SKILL.md files the host discovers.

Agent	Output	Skills	Install	Invoke
Claude Code	native	✅	marketplace (below)	/bootstrap
Claude Cowork	native	✅	desktop plugin upload	/bootstrap
pi	native	✅	pi install npm:@evolvehq/docflow	/skill:bootstrap
Codex	native	✅	codex plugin marketplace add EvolveHQ/docflow	$bootstrap / /skills
OpenCode	native	✅	auto-discovered, or symlink into ~/.config/opencode/skills	auto, by description

Handy: OpenCode also reads ~/.claude/skills/ and ~/.agents/skills/, so a shared skills directory can serve it alongside another agent.

Claude Code — from this marketplace

/plugin marketplace add EvolveHQ/docflow
/plugin install docflow@evolvehq

Invoke with /bootstrap, /new-adr, /ship-item, … (auto-triggers on matching requests too).

Claude Cowork

Cowork accepts the same plugin bundle through Customise → Plugins → Add → Upload plugin. ZIP the contents of plugins/docflow/, including its hidden .claude-plugin directory, and upload it. Use a configured marketplace when available. The desktop interface and execution permissions differ from the Claude Code CLI; a loaded plugin does not guarantee Git access to an attached folder. Verify file changes and Git history in the actual target folder.

pi coding agent

pi install npm:@evolvehq/docflow

or, from source, pi install git:github.com/EvolveHQ/docflow. Pi auto-discovers the skills via the pi.skills key in package.json. Invoke with /skill:bootstrap, /skill:new-adr, /skill:ship-item, … Pi does not auto-trigger skills from their descriptions the way Claude Code does — invoke them explicitly (the agent will also load a skill on-demand when a task clearly matches).

The scaffolded output (AGENTS.md, CONVENTIONS.md, the ADR catalogue, plan/, _agent/) is plain Markdown and is read natively by pi's hierarchical AGENTS.md loading — no porting needed.

Codex (OpenAI)

docflow ships a Codex plugin (.codex-plugin/), so it's a one-command install from this repo's marketplace:

codex plugin marketplace add EvolveHQ/docflow
codex plugin add docflow@evolvehq

Codex reads the scaffolded AGENTS.md natively. Invoke with $bootstrap