weft

Deterministic workflow tracking for Claude Code — smart skills, template management, dashboard auto-refresh.

Weft turns ad-hoc agent sessions into auditable, event-sourced workflows. Define a template (plan → implement → verify, or an 11-step ticket-to-PR cycle), and weft enforces the order, blocks tools that violate the current step's guards, and refuses to let you Stop with steps still pending.

Multi-step engineering work needs structure that survives compaction, retries, and the agent forgetting what step it's on. Weft solves three problems:

• Skills fire reliably — /wf-start, /wf-step, /wf-status read state from disk, not memory.
• Templates apply consistently — workflows live in JSON, version-controlled with your project.
• Hooks enforce the contract — PreToolUse, PreCompact, and Stop block out-of-order actions or premature exits.

State is an append-only event log under .claude/weft/, so every workflow is fully reconstructible.

Built-in TODOs and ad-hoc checklists live in the agent's context window. They're advisory — the model can ignore them, lose them across compaction, or skip steps it judges unnecessary. They have no enforcement, no replay, no per-step guards. Weft is the opposite tradeoff: a small contract written to disk, enforced by hooks, with an event log you can audit after the fact. Use TODOs when "the model probably remembers" is good enough. Use weft when it isn't.

• Python 3.10+ (stdlib only — no runtime dependencies)
• Claude Code with plugin support
• macOS or Linux (the dashboard uses curses; Windows is untested)

Weft ships as a Claude Code plugin. Install via the marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add dioptx/weft
/plugin install weft@dioptx-weft

Or, for development / hacking on weft itself:

git clone https://github.com/dioptx/weft.git
claude --plugin-dir ./weft

The plugin auto-registers four hooks (SessionStart, PreToolUse, PreCompact, Stop) and 11 skills via .claude-plugin/plugin.json and hooks/hooks.json. Restart Claude Code and the /wf-* commands become available.

/wf-start generic        # plan → implement → verify
/wf-status               # show current state
/wf-step complete        # advance to the next step
/wf-analyze              # per-template timing + recurring friction across runs

Run /wf-start with no args for the guided template picker.

See docs/demo.md for an annotated end-to-end walkthrough, and docs/demos/ for the asciicasts and recording scripts behind every GIF in this README.

Templates are JSON. You can author one inline and pipe it to weft save-template — no editor required, no scaffolder. The template lands in .claude/weft/templates/ and is immediately available to weft start.

cat > flow.json << 'EOF'
{
  "name": "site-audit",
  "steps": [
    {"name": "crawl",  "skill": "/perplexity"},
    {"name": "review", "skill": "/staff-review"},
    {"name": "fix",    "skill": "/fix-polish"},
    {"name": "verify", "loop_back_to": "review", "max_iterations": 3,
     "exit_condition": "no high-severity findings"},
    {"name": "push",
     "guards": [{"command_pattern": "\\bgit\\b[^|;&\\n]*\\bpush\\b",
                 "message": "git push may run only during push, after verification"}]}
  ]
}
EOF
weft save-template < flow.json
weft start site-audit

For interactive composition based on what's in your current conversation, use /wf-compose.

A guard means this command may run only on its owner step. During a running workflow, the engine skips the current step's guards and checks every other step's guards. A match there blocks the call. Put each command's guard on one step: putting the same guard on two steps blocks the command on every step, because another owner's guard always matches.

Guards are regular expressions in command_pattern (or plain strings). For Bash they match the command, for Edit and Write the file path, and for other tools the tool name, including MCP names such as mcp__linear__create_issue. Write patterns that cover flags between command words: \bgit\b[^|;&\n]*\bpush\b matches both git push and git -C work push. JSON requires doubled backslashes, as in the example above. These are regex checks over tool calls, not a shell parser. Existing per-run approvals can allow exact Bash commands.

Step descriptions and exit conditions guide the agent; the state machine does not execute checks or collect human approval automatically. Claude Code hooks enforce the guards when registered; running the CLI alone exercises the state machine without installing tool enforcement in another agent.

Weft consumes Claude Code skills (SKILL.md files under .claude/skills/) as workflow steps. Drop a new skill in, reference it from a template via skill: /<name>, and weft picks it up.

mkdir -p .claude/skills/site-audit
cat > .claude/skills/site-audit/SKILL.md << 'EOF'
---
name: site-audit
description: Crawl + audit a target site with lighthouse
allowed-tools: [Bash, Read]
---
# Site Audit
Run lighthouse against $URL, report findings.
EOF

cat <<'JSON' | weft save-template
{
  "name": "audit-cycle",
  "steps": [
    {"name": "audit", "skill": "/site-audit"},
    {"name": "fix",   "skill": "/fix-polish"}
  ]
}
JSON

• Event-sourced state machine — append-only JSON log; rebuild state with /wf-rebuild
• Template system — six bundled workflows (listed below); add your own under templates/ (project), ~/.weft/templates/ (user-global), or WEFT_USER_TEMPLATES_DIR
• Smart skills — 12 slash commands (wf-start, wf-step, wf-status, wf-resume, wf-run-step, wf-abort, wf-preview, wf-rebuild, wf-analyze, wf-template, wf-compose, ev-query)
• Guard engine — commands, file paths and MCP tool names restricted to their owner step via the PreToolUse hook
• Plan checker — weft check-plan plan.json validates claim coverage, milestone dates, dependencies and completion criteria with no tracker access
• Stop gate — refuses session exit while steps are incomplete (configurable via on_fail: block|retry|skip)
• Compaction-safe — PreCompact hook writes a context.md projection so the next session resumes mid-workflow
• Live dashboard — auto-refreshing TUI for monitoring active workflows
• Template management — /wf-template for creating and editing templates in-session

See the planning contract for plan.json, optional whiteboard annotations and capacity evidence, existing issue reuse, and retry-safe publication. Planning ends at tickets and never starts a build. The final planning step writes planning/<slug>/retro.md; plan-retro later adds the build-out section with evidence and human confirmation.

Every workflow transition is an append-only event in .claude/weft/events.jsonl. The state.json snapshot is just a projection — delete it and weft will rebuild it from events alone.

weft query                       # human-readable timeline
tail -3 .claude/weft/events.jsonl  # raw structured events
rm .claude/weft/state.json       # nuke the snapshot
weft rebuild                     # reconstruct from events alone

Use weft query --type wf.step_changed, --last 50, or --workflow <id> to filter.

For watching multiple workflows at once, scripts/wf.py is a curses-based TUI over the same state. Three views: list (every running workflow + PR/CI status), detail (per-workflow step + recent events), templates (discovery).

python3 $WEFT_ROOT/scripts/wf.py                 # interactive TUI
python3 $WEFT_ROOT/scripts/wf.py --list          # plain-text table (auto when not TTY)
python3 $WEFT_ROOT/scripts/wf.py --json | jq     # machine-readable
python3 $WEFT_ROOT/scripts/wf.py --templates     # template catalog

Keys in the list view: j/k navigate, enter open detail, t templates, r refresh, q quit. Detail view: esc/h back, r refresh, q quit. Read-only — never mutates weft state.

The TUI scans the current directory by default; pass a path to scan elsewhere. It picks up both legacy single-workflow layouts (<project>/.claude/weft/) and per-ticket layouts (<project>/.claude/weft/workflows/<id>/.claude/weft/).

For scripting without curses, scripts/wf-monitor.py produces the same aligned-table output and supports --json, --templates, and an explicit project path argument.

Suggested shell alias:

alias wf='python3 ~/.claude/plugins/cache/local/weft/0.4.2/scripts/wf.py'

.claude-plugin/   plugin.json — Claude Code plugin manifest
core/             Python event store, state machine, projections, CLI, dashboard
hooks/            SessionStart / PreToolUse / PreCompact / Stop bash hooks + hooks.json
skills/           11 SKILL.md files for the /wf-* and /ev-* slash commands
scripts/          wf.py (curses TUI) + wf-monitor.py (plain-text + JSON viewer)
templates/        Bundled workflow definitions (JSON)
tests/            pytest suite covering event store, state machine, hooks, CLI, behaviors

The Python core is dependency-free (stdlib only). The dashboard uses curses. Tests use pytest.

Weft discovers templates from three locations, in order of precedence:

Same-named template higher in the table overrides lower tiers, so you can shadow a bundled template with a project-specific variant.

v0.4.2 — current. See CHANGELOG.md for release history.

See CONTRIBUTING.md for how to run tests, add templates, and propose changes.

MIT © dioptx