A host-agnostic configuration layer for intent-driven development.
abcd is for people who know what they want to build and need help shipping it.
Agents are good at producing work and bad at remembering why. Ask one to build something and it will, then the next session starts again from the artefact rather than the argument. What was decided, what was rejected and on what evidence lives in a transcript nobody reads twice, so the reasoning is spent as fast as it is made.
abcd keeps that reasoning as records the agent and the human both read: the intent that says what shipping looks like, the decision that says what was chosen and what was refused, the specification, the issue ledger. They are plain files in the repository, checked by gates that refuse rather than warn, so what the record claims about the product stays true as the product moves.
abcd is built with abcd, and its own record is public and complete: Every decision, intent, specification and issue, from the first commit onward, with
the reasoning attached rather than summarised.
That record is the demonstration. It is 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. Read it at abcdev.app, alongside who abcd is for, the roles, the artefacts and the process, rendered from the pages in docs/ and the development record.
abcd is experimental and the surface still moves: Verbs change and it's currently only available for a single harness. What's not experimental is the record and neither is the discipline it's being built with.
The easiest route to get started is to install abcd as a Claude Code plugin.
Run these two, in order, from a session in that harness:
/plugin marketplace add intentdriven/abcd
/plugin install abcd@abcd-marketplace
The first registers this repository as a plugin marketplace; the second installs abcd from it. Restart the session afterwards so the hooks load, then check what you got:
/abcd:version
Later, /plugin update abcd pulls the marketplace's current state. Two things move at different speeds: the plugin surface tracks this repository, and the binary it provisions tracks the latest published release. Reloading plugins is not the same thing: that re-reads what is already on disk, so it refreshes the commands while leaving the binary as it was.
Support for other harnesses will follow.
If your harness isn't supported yet, abcd runs from a terminal in any repository, with no harness involved:
sh -c 'set -eu; 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 -fsSLO "https://github.com/intentdriven/abcd/releases/latest/download/$b"; curl -fsSLO "https://github.com/intentdriven/abcd/releases/latest/download/checksums.txt"; grep " $b$" checksums.txt | if command -v sha256sum >/dev/null; then sha256sum -c -; else shasum -a 256 -c -; fi; mkdir -p "$HOME/.local/bin"; install -m 0755 "$b" "$HOME/.local/bin/abcd"; "$HOME/.local/bin/abcd" version'Checksum-verified, no administrator rights, installs to ~/.local/bin. The install guide covers building from source and what to do when abcd isn't found afterwards. Consult the verb reference for what abcd can do.
SECURITY.md: report a vulnerability privately.ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS.md: the ideas, tools and writingabcdstands on.