<h1 align="center">Professor</h1>

<p align="center">
  <strong>Multi-agent framework for Claude Code, Codex &amp; OpenCode.</strong><br>
  Turns the AI coding chats on your machine into a disciplined engineering team —<br>
  one you can see, message, and hold to the rules.
</p>

<p align="center">
  <a href="https://github.com/rezzminator/professor/actions/workflows/verify.yml"><img alt="verify" src="https://github.com/rezzminator/professor/actions/workflows/verify.yml/badge.svg?branch=main"></a>
  <a href="https://github.com/rezzminator/professor/releases"><img alt="release" src="https://img.shields.io/github/v/release/rezzminator/professor"></a>
  <a href="LICENSE"><img alt="license" src="https://img.shields.io/github/license/rezzminator/professor"></a>
  <img alt="go" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/go-1.27-00ADD8">
  <img alt="platform" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/platform-linux%20%7C%20macOS-lightgrey">
  <img alt="works with" src="https://img.shields.io/badge/works%20with-Claude%20Code%20%C2%B7%20Codex%20%C2%B7%20OpenCode-8A2BE2">
</p>

<p align="center">
  <a href="#six-things-you-can-watch-it-do">Watch it work</a> ·
  <a href="#install">Install</a> ·
  <a href="#the-discipline-layer-templates">Discipline layer</a> ·
  <a href="#the-fleet-cli-pfm">Fleet CLI</a> ·
  <a href="#workflows-workflows">Workflows</a> ·
  <a href="docs/BLUEPRINT.md">Blueprint</a>
</p>

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/fleet.webp" alt="The pfm cosmos tab: four project stars — harvester, atlas, lumen, orbit — with their chats in orbit, coloured by engine; a comet flies along every chat_inject, the comms ledger scrolls underneath" width="900">
</p>

<h2 align="center">Professor is a complete, integrated toolbox for everything you want to do — that Anthropic, OpenAI <em>or anyone else</em> will <em>never</em> give you.</h2>

A fleet controller and a discipline layer for **Claude Code, Codex, and OpenCode** — chats that talk to each other, agents that follow the rules, and a harvester that reads what the web won't show a bot.

## Why Professor?

You already run more than one AI chat. They cannot see each other, they forget the rules the moment context compacts, and a growing share of the web answers them with a 403. Professor is the layer that fixes all three — without touching what your harness is, only what it does.

| | Without Professor | With Professor |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Many chats, many accounts | Scattered terminal tabs; a closed tab is a lost chat | One picker — every chat on every harness, live or resumable |
| One chat needs another | You copy-paste between windows | `chat_inject` — a signed turn, delivered and acknowledged |
| The rules, after compaction | Whatever the prompt still remembers | Hooks that refuse, with the unlock steps in the refusal |
| A bot-blocked page | A 403, or an empty page reported as content | A seven-rung fetch ladder; a block is reported as a block |
| Claude and Codex rules | Two files that drift apart | One `CLAUDE.md`, compiled mirrors, drift fails the check |
| An account hits its limit | Start over in a new chat | `/reload --account 2` — same pane, same history |

---

## Six things you can watch it do

Every transcript below is real output from this repository, redacted only of names.

### 1. See the fleet

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/pkx.webp" alt="pfm ls: every chat on this machine on one screen — api, webapp and ops projects; live, resumable, agent-run and new rows across Claude, Codex and OpenCode. The picker opens a Claude chat, takes a message, detaches back to the picker, then opens a Codex chat — same screen, different engine" width="900">
</p>

> `pfm ls`: every AI chat on the machine — Claude Code, Codex (⬢), and OpenCode — across accounts (🥇🥈), grouped by repo, live (●), resumable (↻), or agent-run (⚙). `⇄` marks chats that talk to other chats; `←here` is the one you are sitting in; `✦` opens a new one on any harness. Pick one, attach, or fire it a goal without ever attaching. A chat that scrolled off a closed terminal tab is not gone — it is a resumable transcript, and now somebody can find it.

`tab` once more and the same fleet is drawn as the sky at the top of this page.

> Every project is a star its chats orbit; a spawned chat rises as a moon at its parent's angle, so lineage is visible in the sky itself. When chats talk to each other the sky draws an edge between them, read from a durable comms ledger — an edge is a fact, not a guess. The chronoscope replays the last 24h, and a chat that is dead now still renders as the ghost it was back then.

### 2. Chats that talk to each other

Two panes, two harnesses. You type one line into the Claude chat on the left; the Codex chat on the right receives it as a signed turn and gets to work.

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/duo.webp" alt="Cross-harness orchestration: one Claude chat dispatches three workers — a Codex reviewer, an OpenCode docs writer, a Claude test runner — with chat_inject; each ACK and VERDICT flies back into the commanding chat, dispatched 3 · received 3" width="900">
</p>

> The footer on the Codex side is the signature: who spoke (`sid 0a98b7fe`) and the exact command to answer them. A message no sender could be derived for is refused, never delivered anonymously.

`pfm chat inject` is what the Claude chat called — it types a real, signed turn into another chat's pane — under a per-target lock, safe against a busy target (`--force-now`) and shell-hostile payloads (`--file`). `pfm chat ask` waits for the answer, with named exit codes: `0 done · 2 usage · 3 chat dead · 4 no such chat · 5 answer timed out · 6 message not delivered · 7 answered, but another message reached the chat mid-wait`. The same verbs are the chat family of the `professor` MCP server (`chat_*` tools), so an agent can spawn, message, read, and retire other chats across all three harnesses — and `servicedesk` lets it file a bug against its own host tool.

### 3. Rules that bite

A subagent tries to `Edit` a file under `.claude/`. The PreToolUse guard answers:

```text
DENIED — infra edits route through /pcm: open this session's gate from the repo root …
Do NOT route around this by disabling the hook or editing infra outside /pcm.
```

The refusal carries its own unlock steps. That is one of the mandatory rules every install ships with: only `gitter` writes git; guarded files sit behind `/pcm`; and **an error never renders as ABSENCE** — "we failed to look" is never shown as "nothing there".

### 4. Read what the web hides from bots

About one in ten of the world's top 10,000 websites now tells AI crawlers to stay out — among news publishers, more than half (HasData AI Crawler Block Index, July 2026). Harvester fetches the way a reader's browser does and climbs a seven-rung ladder — direct → Chrome-fingerprint TLS → reader proxy → extractor → headless-then-headed browser → Wayback → OCR — until it holds real content:

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/harv.webp" alt="Harvester: a fetch climbs the ladder on a live stage — every source it touched lit, every step logged with its reason, the result box with the character count and the trace; then the next scenario" width="900">
</p>

A block is reported as a block and an app shell is never stored as the page — a failure names every source it checked, never an empty success. DOIs, ISBNs, PMIDs and PMCIDs route through twelve open-access resolvers in parallel; `pfm harvest ask -p "…" <sources>` feeds the full cached artifacts to a Claude or Codex ask engine, failed sources kept visible as receipts. The whole surface is also the harvester family of the `professor` MCP server (`harvester_*` tools) — one stdio registration, `pfm mcp serve --stdio`, for Claude, Codex and OpenCode alike, forwarding to the daemon's `/mcp/professor`. The browser rung never solves anything interactive.

### 5. One contract, three runtimes

```text
$ pfm codex build .
$ head -1 AGENTS.md
<!-- Generated by pfm codex build from CLAUDE.md; do not edit — edit the source, then re-run: pfm codex build -->
$ pfm codex check .
CODEX CHECK PASS
```

`CLAUDE.md` compiles to `AGENTS.md`; `.claude/**` compiles to `.codex/**` and `.opencode/**`; global agents' `.toml` roles compile straight into `~/.codex/agents/` as regular files — Codex opens a role with `O_NOFOLLOW` and refuses a symlink, so a link there is a role that cannot spawn. Every mirror is generated, never tracked — a fresh clone has none of them until its compiler runs. The Stop hook recompiles the mirrors and a drifted mirror fails the check, so the three harnesses can never disagree about the law. Even the verification engine is one TypeScript source compiled for both the Claude Workflow runtime and the Codex SDK.

### 6. Reload without losing the conversation

Every seat's windows on one tab, confirmed against the provider every two seconds — you see 96% before it becomes 100%:

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/limx.webp" alt="The pfm Limits tab: three Claude seats and a Codex home, each with its 5-hour and 7-day usage bars, percentage used and time to reset, provider-confirmed seconds ago" width="900">
</p>

Account 🥇 is at 96% of its 5-hour window. The usage hook warns the chat mid-task; it finishes the step in flight and moves the conversation to 🥈 itself — same pane, same history:

<p align="center">
  <img src="docs/img/cards/reloadx.webp" alt="Reload without losing the conversation: the usage-limit hook fires at 96% on account 1; the chat finishes step 3, calls pfm chat reload --account 2 --then, the pane reboots in place on account 2 with every earlier turn still there, and resumes at step 4" width="900">
</p>

> The red banner is the usage hook — it reaches the model before the limit does. `/reload` typed by a human goes through a hook too, before the model sees it, so the reboot never spends a turn.

The running chat reboots in place — same pane, same history, new account, model, or effort. `--then "prompt"` hands the baton unattended; `/reload` typed by a human runs through a hook without spending a model turn; `/handoff --branch` carries the full context into a detached successor.

---

## Install

Two independent halves; adopt either without the other.

- **`pfm`**, the fleet CLI — one Go binary, touches only your `$HOME`. Binary or source: [INSTALL.md](INSTALL.md).
- **The discipline layer** — cloned, then scaffolded into your repo through an interview:

```bash
REPO=rezzminator/professor
TAG=$(git ls-remote --tags --sort=-v:refname "https://github.com/${REPO}.git" 'v*' \
  | grep -v '\^{}' | head -1 | sed 's#.*/##')
git clone "https://github.com/${REPO}.git" "$HOME/.professor"
git -C "$HOME/.professor" checkout "$TAG"
cat "$HOME/.professor/docs/SETUP.md"      # the install interview — start here
```

The checkout is pinned to the latest semantic version tag. A maintainer checkout also runs `git config core.hooksPath .githooks` so `pfm doctor` reports `pre-push gate=armed`. Upgrading? Follow the [update workflow](INSTALL.md#updating): `pfm doctor --project-updates` reports `UPDATED / NEW / GONE-UPSTREAM / LOCAL-DELETED` with the upstream diff under each `UPDATED` row, you carry what applies into your local file, and `pin` / `ignore` / `drop` record your decision — pfm never rewrites a project file after init.

> [!WARNING]
> **Read before opting in:** `pfm` defaults Claude to bypass mode and Codex to approval bypass; machine and per-account configuration can select the prompted posture. The `professor` MCP server's two families ship disabled — `mcp.servers.chat.enabled` for chat, `harvester.enabled` for the harvester. The trade-off is deliberate and documented, not hidden.

---

## The discipline layer (`templates/`)

Clone it into a repo and you get the complete agent, command, hook, script, and `CLAUDE.md` template set. `docs/SETUP.md` walks an interview that substitutes your project's names into every placeholder; `docs/PLACEHOLDERS.md` is the substitution law. Every template is the live source file verbatim — never a skeleton.

The single idea underneath it is the **honest-looking absence** — an instrument that answers "nothing found" both when nothing is there and when the instrument itself is broken. The rules say it out loud:

> An empty enumeration is never a verdict.

- **One agent writes git.** `gitter` is the only agent that commits; every other agent is read-only.
- **Guarded files.** `.claude/**` and every `CLAUDE.md` sit behind `/pcm` plus a session that has read the quality-prompt contract.
- **The judge is never the thing being judged.** Verdicts are read from disk, never from a brief that asserts green.
- **The flight pipeline.** `/flights:spec` writes `requirements.md` and hands it to `flights-foreman`, which builds the request and splits only by build-unit ownership into child foremen; each return is verified against its diff; one `flights-lander` for the whole flight runs every project's checks, one review of the whole diff and adversarial tests, then `gitter` commits. `/flights:audit` re-reads the whole flight from its own artifacts, never from what an agent said it did.
- **The persona is load-bearing.** The Professor prompt replaces the vendor system prompt; the vendor baselines are pinned by sha256 so `pfm doctor` reports `MATCHES / DRIFT / CHECK FAILED / CANNOT CAPTURE` — never silence.

Optional roles ship for teams that want them — `/officer`, `/mentor`, `/marketer` — along with a legal skill shelf. **The philosophy lives in [docs/BLUEPRINT.md](docs/BLUEPRINT.md).**

---

## The fleet CLI (`pfm/`)

One Go binary with embedded installer assets. Beyond the six moments above:

- **Limits, honestly.** The `Limits` tab shows every provider window on the box; a provider it cannot reach never renders as a 0% bar — the panel says `no usage source registered` instead.
- **Crash-safety by construction.** `reap`, `archive`, `heal`, and `install` default to a dry run, and the dry run **is** the apply's preview. `heal` backs up the store before it deletes a row.
- **Headless exec.** `pfm headless exec` is one scriptable interface for Claude and OpenCode; `--engine codex` also routes to OpenCode. Prompt, system prompt, schema, and timeout go in; normalized results or native streams come out. See [headless README](pfm/internal/headless/README.md).
- **Housekeeping.** `doctor` runs the dependency registry and fleet DB checks; `tokens` attributes spend per agent; `context-meter` prices every prompt surface; `statusline` renders identity, session and spend; `codex build|check` is the single writer of the Codex mirror.
- **Editor.** `pfm install --vscode` installs the Professor VS Code extension — visible as **Professor** in the Extensions view and a **Professor** entry in the terminal `+` dropdown — and makes the `PFM` settings profile (its own icon and colour) the default, so each new integrated terminal opens at the fleet picker. To open a Professor terminal, press Ctrl+Shift+Alt+T (macOS: Cmd+Shift+Alt+T), run **Professor: New Chat Terminal**, or pick **Professor** from the terminal `+` dropdown — all three give the next icon and colour; the default `+` terminal is `PFM`.

<details>
<summary><strong>Requirements</strong> — Linux or macOS, <code>tmux</code>, Go 1.27.1+ for source builds</summary>

From `pfm doctor`'s own registry: Linux or macOS, `amd64` or `arm64`, plus `tmux` ≥ 1.8, `git`, `sh`, `bash`, `zsh`, and `sleep`; `setsid` on Linux, `ps`/`lsof`/`launchctl` on macOS. Go **1.27.1 or newer** for source builds and `pfm update`. The `claude` and `codex` CLIs are optional diagnostics. The harvester provisions its own pinned `uv` and CPython (about 3.1 GB to download and 5.8 GB on disk for the current Linux `amd64` lock), skippable with `--skip-harvest`; themes with `--skip-themes`; the Codex probe with `--skip-engine codex`. Run the [dry preview](INSTALL.md#preview-optional-components-and-harvest-footprint) before applying. Harvester configuration: [harvest README](pfm/internal/harvest/README.md).

</details>

---

## Plugins

Claude Code plugins built with Professor, installable on their own. This repo is their marketplace:

```bash
claude plugin marketplace add rezzminator/professor
claude plugin install sub-agent-compact@professor
```

- [sub-agent-compact](https://github.com/rezzminator/sub-agent-compact): a separate auto-compact point for the main chat and every sub-agent, and self-compaction at a milestone the model chooses.
- [cache-live-control](https://github.com/rezzminator/cache-live-control): a `/cache` command that switches the prompt-cache TTL (5m, 1h or automatic) for one chat and its sub-agents, live, with no model turn.
- [agent-effort](https://github.com/rezzminator/agent-effort): per-spawn reasoning effort for sub-agents — start the Agent prompt with `[effort: low|medium|high|xhigh|max]`.
- [buddy](https://github.com/rezzminator/buddy): a tiny ASCII companion above your prompt — Quack the duck, seven more characters or your own — that comments on each turn, suggests your next prompt and answers `/buddy` questions from what it remembers of the chat.
- [callmeter](https://github.com/rezzminator/callmeter): records every tool call, model request, sub-agent turn and session event into one local SQLite store — counts and sizes, never your prompts or file contents — and answers which files, commands and agents cost the most.

## Origin

Extracted from a live production monorepo, not designed in the abstract. Every rule here exists because something went wrong without it — the gate that reads disk instead of chat exists because an agent once claimed green; the scoped-commit rule exists because two concurrent commits once swallowed each other's files; the prevention step exists because the same bug class shipped twice. The characters exist because a generic agent wasn't good enough to argue with.

Built by [@rezzminator](https://github.com/rezzminator).

## Help and community

Questions and ideas go to [Discussions](https://github.com/rezzminator/professor/discussions), bugs to [an issue](https://github.com/rezzminator/professor/issues/new/choose), vulnerabilities privately through [SECURITY.md](SECURITY.md); [SUPPORT.md](SUPPORT.md) has the details.

## Contributing

Work lands on `develop`; `main` moves only by release. [CONTRIBUTING.md](CONTRIBUTING.md) carries the build, the gates and the rules of a repository whose files ship into other people's agent pipelines. Pull requests are welcome.

## License

[MIT](LICENSE)