caddis — a Claude Code harness

caddis is a Claude Code harness — a plugin (plus a shared pool of skills, subagents, slash-commands, and hooks) that makes a single Claude Code session dramatically more capable and much harder to derail. It's agent-agnostic: the same pool is exported to other AI CLIs (Codex, Antigravity, Copilot), and CLAUDE.md↔AGENTS.md are mirrors so every agent reads the same conventions.

Before you start

Honest about the platform: caddis is developed and used daily on Windows with PowerShell. The hooks are pure Python and cross-platform, and the skills, commands and agents are plain markdown that work anywhere — but some launchers ship as both .ps1 and .sh, the deployment skill is Windows-specific, and the publishing machinery (sync.ps1) is PowerShell-only. Nothing here is hostile to macOS or Linux; it is simply less travelled, so expect rough edges and please report them.

Related MCP server: Bernstein - Multi-agent orchestration

Your first five minutes

claude plugin marketplace add saajunaid/caddis-plugin
claude plugin install caddis@caddis

Then, in a Claude Code session, confirm it actually loaded:

/caddis:version

If that prints a version, you are installed. From there, the shortest path to seeing what caddis is for:

Everything else is optional. If you only ever use feature-plan → implement → cross-review, you have most of the value.

This repository is the published marketplace mirror: it hosts the caddis and caddis-extras Claude Code plugins, the portable per-harness bundles under bundles/, and the shared pool. It is generated and pushed by the caddis authoring repo's exporter — issues are welcome here, but code changes land upstream and are synced in.

Install (Claude Code)

# 1. Register this repo as a plugin marketplace (once)
claude plugin marketplace add saajunaid/caddis-plugin

# 2. Install the core plugin (always-on, lean context)
claude plugin install caddis@caddis

# 3. (optional) Add the long-tail skill library — cloud/data/media/etc. Disabled by default,
#    so it costs zero always-on context until you enable it.
claude plugin install caddis-extras@caddis

Then, in any repo:

/caddis:setup-project-ai     # deploy the harness into the project

A normal working loop looks like:

/feature-plan      # (or /prd first) → writes .caddis/plans/<slug>.md, the durable spine
/implement         # executes the plan phase-by-phase, TDD, commit per phase
/ship              # express lane: commit → push → CI (hotfixes); feature work: /ship-pr then /ship-merge
/handoff           # ALWAYS end a session with this — writes the resume doc

The one habit that matters most: end every session with /handoff. It writes .caddis/relay.md, which is re-injected automatically at the next session start — you resume with zero re-discovery instead of a cold, forgetful session.

See USERGUIDE.md for the full command/skill/hook reference and the mental models.

What you get

• Slash-commands — /feature-plan, /prd, /implement, /tdd, /ship · /ship-pr · /ship-merge, /handoff, /kb, /digress · /resume, /cross-review, /usage-review, /mermaid-db · /excalidraw-db, /setup-project-ai, /migrate-dir.

• Subagents — lean, own-context helpers: anchor (evidence-first verification), code-reviewer, preflight (plan-vs-codebase validation), tester, debug, codebase-audit, security-analyst, data-engineer, sql-expert, knowledge-transfer.

• A four-layer memory model — session relay (relay.md), automatic Dream Memory (memory.jsonl), a per-repo knowledge base (.caddis/kb/ + DOC-MAP.md), and cross-repo memory.

• Hooks & safety — a PreToolUse guard for secret/destructive writes, auto-lint on edit, and the SessionStart/Stop hooks behind relay + memory.

• Tiered skills — the core dev set ships in caddis; the long tail (cloud, data, media, productivity) lives in caddis-extras, off by default.

Installing outside Claude Code (Codex, Antigravity, …)

The knowledge layer (skills + AGENTS.md conventions) works in any harness. Per-harness bundles are published under bundles/ and installed with caddis-init:

# from a checkout of this repo (the installer ships in plugin/scripts/)
python plugin/scripts/claudster_init.py --target codex        --dest /path/to/project
python plugin/scripts/claudster_init.py --target antigravity  --dest /path/to/project

Safe by design: a sha256 manifest tracks what the installer wrote; re-runs update only unmodified files, and anything you edited locally is reported as a conflict, never overwritten.

Repo layout

A note on names

caddis was previously published as claudster (and, before that, this repo hosted the junai Copilot pipeline — see the pre-1.2 entries in CHANGELOG.md). Repos set up under the old name have a .claudster/ artifact dir; everything reads both .caddis/ and .claudster/ and writes where the repo already lives, so nothing breaks. Run /caddis:migrate-dir when you want a repo converted. The ~/.claudster/ user scope (keys, install records) is permanent.

License

MIT. The published plugin bundles (caddis / caddis-extras) carry the same license in their manifests.