abcd

README

Agent-Based Configuration for Development

For people who know what they want to build and need help shipping it.

What it is for

AI agents are very good at coding but not always at remembering human intentions for why the code was written. abcd is a host-agnostic configuration layer for intent-driven development, there to help you actually ship what you set out to build, including what was decided, what was rejected, and on what evidence.

In AI-assisted development, this (human) reasoning typically lives in transcripts that are hard to decipher after the fact. abcd keeps it as structured records the product thinker, the facilitator, and their agents do read: The intent that says what shipping looks like, the decision that says what was chosen and what was refused, the specification that says how to build it, and the issue ledger that says what must be revisited. In abcd, these structured records are plain files that live inside the repository, and they are checked by gates, most of which refuse rather than warn, so a record that drifts from the repository is caught rather than noted. Whether what a record claims about the product holds is a second judgement: An audit reads a shipped intent's acceptance criteria against the code that shipped and states a verdict on each one. That verdict is recorded, not enforced.

Built in the open

abcd is an experiment. First, it is an experiment of building itself, which is why its documented development record is public and complete: Every decision, intent, specification, and issue, from the first commit onward, with the reasoning attached. That record is the demonstration. Not a claim that the approach works, but the trail of a real product being built this way, including the parts that were wrong: Reversed decisions, abandoned designs, and defects found by the gates and recorded before they were fixed.

abcd is also an experiment for the team building it. As self-declared enthusiastic dilettantes, we learn best by doing stuff, and abcd demonstrates not only what it does, but also how we're learning AI-assisted development while building it.

If you want to know more about abcd, you can interrogate its entire development record at abcdev.app/record/, alongside more details on who abcd is for, the different roles, artefacts, and process. If you want to get involved, watch the repository or open a discussion.

Key principles

abcd is founded on several principles, some of which guide its design while others guide how development artefacts are recorded.

Design principles

What abcd is (and, by extension, what it refuses to become):

• abcd builds abcd: The framework develops under its own record and gates, so every convention it imposes is one the team lives with (for better or worse!).
• Prefer the experiment to the inference: A claim that can be settled by running the system is settled by running it; reading the files yields a working assumption, never a finding.
• Verifier selects, gates decide: A model's verdict ranks, flags, and proposes; admission to the record is decided by deterministic gates.
• And: Less, but better (Dieter Rams): Reach for the subtraction first, which, in abcd translates into fewer verbs, records, and rules.

Record principles

How intents, decisions, specifications, and issues are made and kept true:

• Work starts from an intent: A shipping change opens as a press release for the user it serves; the work exists to make that page true.
• The record lands with the act: A record is written by the same commit that makes it true.
• Enforcement claims are facts: A gate is described only where it demonstrably runs; a planned check is an intent.
• And: The record is part of the product: Intents, decisions, specifications, and issues are plain files in the repository, versioned and reviewed like the code they explain.

Install

If you wish to experiment with abcd, we recommend installing it as a plugin (but do remember that it's experimental!).

Requirements

• Git: Always. abcd shells out to the git binary and anchors every record it keeps to a repository.
• A released platform: macOS or Linux, on amd64 or arm64. (Windows runs the Linux route inside WSL).
• An agent harness: The plugin route and the verbs that hand their work to a model, and nothing else.

At this stage, abcd supports a single harness. The command-line app runs in any repository without one.

As a plugin

The easiest route to get started is to install abcd as a Claude Code plugin.

Run these two from a session within it. The first registers this repository as a plugin marketplace; the second installs abcd from it.

/plugin marketplace add intentdriven/abcd

Wait for the confirmation that the marketplace was added, then:

/plugin install abcd@abcd-marketplace

Restart the session afterwards so the hooks load, then check what you got:

/abcd:version

Later, /plugin update abcd takes the latest cut release: the marketplace names that release's plugin archive by its SHA-256, and the harness refuses any other bytes. The plugin route needs Claude Code v2.1.224 or later.

As a CLI

Outside a plugin session, abcd runs from a terminal in any repository, with no harness involved. A checksum-verified one-liner provisions it, no administrator rights required:

sh -c 'set -eu; unset HTTPS_PROXY https_proxy HTTP_PROXY http_proxy ALL_PROXY all_proxy CURL_HOME CURL_CA_BUNDLE SSL_CERT_FILE SSL_CERT_DIR; [ ! -L "$HOME/.abcd.noindex" ] || { echo "abcd install: ~/.abcd.noindex is a symlink, which abcd refuses rather than follows; replace it with a real directory and re-run" >&2; exit 1; }; cd "$(mktemp -d)"; os=$(uname -s | tr "[:upper:]" "[:lower:]"); arch=$(uname -m); case "$arch" in x86_64) arch=amd64;; aarch64) arch=arm64;; esac; b="abcd-$os-$arch"; curl -q --proto =https --proto-redir =https -fsSLO "https://github.com/intentdriven/abcd/releases/latest/download/$b"; curl -q --proto =https --proto-redir =https -fsSLO "https://github.com/intentdriven/abcd/releases/latest/download/checksums.txt"; l=$(grep " $b$" checksums.txt); printf "%s\n" "$l" | if command -v sha256sum >/dev/null; then sha256sum -c -; else shasum -a 256 -c -; fi; mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"; install -m 0755 "$b" "$HOME/.local/bin/abcd"; mkdir -p "$HOME/.abcd.noindex"; printf "path=%s\nbinary_sha256=%s\n" "$HOME/.local/bin/abcd" "${l%% *}" > "$HOME/.abcd.noindex/path-entry"; "$HOME/.local/bin/abcd" --version'

The install guide covers building from source and what to do when abcd isn't found afterwards.

First run

Setup

In a plugin session, inside a repository you own, /abcd:prepare-this-repo audits the tree and adopts the working conventions: The three-tier .abcd/ layout, an AGENTS.md router, and the commit gates. Bare /abcd (or abcd from a terminal) then shows where you are; the status board is read-only, so it is safe on any tree:

$ abcd
view for the product thinker
● building: nothing right now
○ next: nothing is ready
• no more ready, nothing parked

abcd --view facilitator shows the full board: the repository, the record, the work tiers, the presence line and every intent with its spec.

Recording your first issue

Issues are everything you wish to revisit: An idea, a user-facing intent, a bug, a thought. /abcd:capture "..." --remedy "..." files an observation, with the fix you would propose, to the issue ledger so it survives the session. Revisit it with /abcd iss-N to report what that record is, where it lives, and its next move, such as graduating it into an intent, or close it with a note.

(The verb reference lists the rest.)

Citation

If you use abcd in your work, please cite it. The form below is rendered from CITATION.cff, which is the record GitHub's own Cite this repository button reads:

@software{reppel_abcd,
  author  = {Reppel, Alex},
  title   = {{abcd}: {Agent-Based} {Configuration} for {Development}},
  url     = {https://github.com/intentdriven/abcd},
  license = {MIT}
}

Resources

• LICENSE: MIT.
• SECURITY.md: Report a vulnerability privately.
• ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md: The ideas, tools, and writing abcd stands on.