ase

About

Agentic Software Engineering (ASE) is the opinionated Open Source companion toolkit of Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall for fusing the concept of Agentic AI Coding and traditional Software Engineering in the software development tool Anthropic Claude Code — and with reduced support also in the alternative tool GitHub Copilot CLI or OpenAI Codex CLI.

ASE ships with 59 agent skills, agent hooks, agent sub-agents, an underlying Model-Context-Protocol (MCP) service and a Command-Line Interface (CLI) with a task store, task boards, and autonomous agents, incorporating reasonable methodology and automation aspects, to support the recurring tasks of a Software Developer and Software Architect.

ASE is primarily motivated by the following statement of its primary author, Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall:

"Software developers in the industrial Software Engineering context, in their recurring tasks, should leverage pre-manufactured agentic AI skills to boost their daily productivity. Those skills incorporate reasonable methodology and automation aspects while keeping the developers in the driver's seat to ensure stable result quality."

Notices

Note TERMINOLOGY: The discipline of Agentic Software Engineering in general is Software Engineering, supported by autonomous AI Agents to perform tasks across the software development lifecycle. This ASE product in particular is also agentic, but not strictly based on autonomous agents. Instead, ASE focuses on supporting the role of a Software Engineer with Agentic AI Coding Tools towards multi-step operations and a plan/task-driven approach, but still strongly focuses on Human-in-the-Loop. Its autonomous agents, which drive tasks headless, are an optional addition only.

Note TOOL SUPPORT FOCUS: The primary focus of ASE is on the Agentic AI Coding tool Claude Code. The secondary focus is on the support for GitHub Copilot CLI (just set environment variable ASE_TOOL=copilot) and OpenAI Codex CLI (just set environment variable ASE_TOOL=codex). In the future, additional support could be provided also for alternative tools — if their agent harness features (especially hooks, interactive user dialog tool, etc.) realistically allow it.

Highlights

Check out the following scenarios and corresponding ASE examples to see whether ASE is right for you:

• Boosted Sessions: You want to speed up your interactive sessions and at the same time reduce costs by reducing the number of produced LLM output tokens? → /ase-meta-config set agent.persona engineer or even /ase-meta-config set agent.persona caveman

• Alternative Approach Funnel: You prefer a plan-driven approach, but the agent harness's Plan Mode is too unstructured and too direct because you want to leverage a funnel of alternative approaches first? → /ase-task-edit -a hello: "ase hello" CLI command which prints a nice "Hello World" in red

• Named and Persisted Plans: You prefer a plan-driven approach, but the agent harness's Plan Mode is regularly too weak, because you want named, persisted, cross-session reachable, and strictly structured plans? → /ase-task-edit hello

• Plan Stress-Testing: You have a task plan, but want to be relentlessly grilled about every essential aspect of it until you and the agent reach a shared understanding and no open decisions remain? → /ase-task-grill hello

• Implementation Drafts: You prefer a plan-driven approach, but want to draft and review the implementation without later having to rewind artifacts via the version control system or the agent harness's session history? → /ase-task-implement --draft hello → /ase-task-integrate --draft hello

• Project Insights: You want to get a quick insight into a project by determining the author, the source files with the most churn, and the module structure? → /ase-code-insight @tool

• Code Comprehension: You want to better comprehend code by finding focused information on What, Why, Analogy, Diagram, Cruxes, and Gotchas? → /ase-code-explain @tool/src/*.ts

• Lexical Code Analysis: You want to analyze code for potential problems related to a standard set of code quality aspects? → /ase-code-lint @tool/src/*.ts

• Document Shortening: You want a document cut down to a hard length budget -- sentences tightened first, low-value content dropped next, the rest compressed last -- with every cut reviewed as a whole block before it is applied? → /ase-docs-shorten --chars 4000 @README.md

• Document Refinement: You want the wording of a document refined -- long sentences shortened, nominal constructions turned into verbs, enumerations made parallel, filler words struck -- while content, numbers, and technical terms stay exactly as they are? → /ase-docs-refine @README.md

• Document Proofreading: You want your text documents checked and corrected for spelling, punctuation, and grammar errors? → /ase-docs-proofread @README.md

• Research Quorum: You want to research a fact by asking multiple (potentially available) foreign LLMs and methodologically derive a quorum answer? → /ase-meta-quorum What is Agentic Software Engineering?

• Logical Code Analysis: You want to analyze code for potential problems in its logic, semantics, and control flow? → /ase-code-analyze @tool/src/*.ts

• Automated Change Logs: You want to get your CHANGELOG.md entries automatically derived from your recent Git commits? → /ase-repo-changelog

• Plan Implementation: You have a named, persisted task plan and now want it implemented as a single, complete change set across your project artifacts? → /ase-task-implement hello

• Change Set Integration: You have implemented a task plan into a change set and now want it delivered into its target branch, with merge conflicts resolved semantically and the task closed afterwards? → /ase-task-integrate hello

• Epic Plan Dissection: You have one large task plan, but want it split domain-wise and logically into cohesive parts, each materialized as its own sub-task plan you can implement separately? → /ase-task-dissect hello

• Specification Activation: You want the SpecBook know-how -- format contract, schema, and artifact set -- activated in your session, so you can query and ad-hoc edit your specification in plain conversation? → /ase-spec-activate which personas does the specification define?

• Specification Editing: You want your SpecBook-based specification changed straight from a plain description, in one shot and kept conformant to its format contract? → /ase-spec-edit -g -v add a Reviewer persona

• Specification Linting: You want your SpecBook-based specification checked for syntax and formatting problems, weak statements, logical gaps in its model, and open ends which would force an implementer to guess? → /ase-spec-lint -i S09,S10

• Artifact Reconciliation: You want one set of artifacts (e.g. CODE, DOCS) automatically aligned to reflect the current state of another set (e.g. SPEC), one-way or bidirectionally? → /ase-sync-reconcile -s SPEC -t DOCS

• Foreign Source Import: You want external files, URLs, or pasted text ingested and turned into structured SPEC, CODE, DOCS, or TASK artifacts? → /ase-sync-import -t SPEC @requirements.txt

• Specification Export: You want your SpecBook-based specification rendered into ready-to-consume files, like a self-contained HTML document or a paginated PDF document? → /ase-sync-export -o docs/spec.html,docs/spec.pdf

• Task Plan Research: You want a topic of a task plan researched in depth, combining Web research with a grounding in your project artifacts, and the plan optionally refined by the recommendations of the research report? → /ase-task-research --refine hello: colored terminal output

• Effort Estimation: You want the effort of your task plans estimated as T-shirt sizes of expected human time, and the estimation calibrated against the actual human time of your finished tasks? → /ase-task-estimate --all

• Live Task Boards: You want all your tasks shown and manipulated live, as Kanban-style lanes, as a dependency graph, or as statistics, in the terminal or in the browser? → ase task board or ase task board --web

• Task Plan Life-Cycle: You want your named, persisted task plans switched, listed, viewed, status-changed, assigned (with their AI usage accounted), renamed, condensed, rebooted, or deleted right from within the session? → /ase-task-id, /ase-task-list, /ase-task-view, /ase-task-status, /ase-task-assign, /ase-task-rename,