The pitch in three lines
- Cursor rents you a workflow. Devin rents you a magic-box. Cline rents you a cloud. We hand you a methodology you can fork and run on your own machine.
- AI tools made you ship faster. They didn't make your code more trustworthy. greenheart is the 7-phase pipeline that makes AI-assisted code reproducible, verifiable, and shippable — not just generatable.
- 27 slash-commands. 4 mechanical quality gates. Zero telemetry. This is the methodology layer Claude Code was missing.
What you actually get
greenheart runs inside your Claude Code session. It adds 27 slash-commands that turn a chaotic "ask AI and hope" workflow into a 7-phase pipeline with mechanical gates between each phase.
Every connection is a gate. Skip it, the next phase rejects you. Try to bullshit it, validate.cjs catches the drift. Solid lines are required paths; dashed are optional or sibling-or-paths (your choice).
What greenheart is not
| It's not | Use instead |
|---|
| An IDE | Keep your editor. greenheart layers on Claude Code. |
| A Cursor / Cline replacement | They're tools. We're a methodology. Use Claude Code for AI-pasting. Use greenheart for AI-shipping. |
| A Devin / Bolt agent | Agents are magic-boxes. We're the opposite: every step writes an audit-trail. |
| A SaaS | No signup. No account. No API key vending. Your subscription, your machine. |
| For enterprise procurement | We're for solo devs who ship to real users. If you need SOC2, look elsewhere. |
Why this, not Cursor / Cline / Devin
| greenheart | Cursor | Cline | Devin / Bolt |
|---|
| Open-source | ✅ MIT | ❌ closed | ✅ Apache | ❌ closed |
| Local-first | ✅ your machine | ❌ cloud-coupled | ❌ cloud-coupled | ❌ cloud-only |
| No vendor lock | ✅ runs on Claude Code | ❌ vendor platform | ❌ vendor platform | ❌ vendor platform |
| Methodology layer | ✅ 7-phase pipeline | ❌ IDE only | ❌ tool only | ❌ agent only |
| Mechanical quality gates | ✅ validate / smoke / qa | ❌ linter only | ❌ linter only | ❌ none visible |
| Multi-lens planning | ✅ deepplan (5 sub-agents) | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Manual OR auto execution | ✅ both | ❌ one mode | ❌ one mode | ❌ auto only |
| Audit trail per step | ✅ artifact per phase | ❌ | partial | ❌ |
| Your subscription | ✅ Claude Code | extra | extra | extra |
| Telemetry | ✅ zero | ❌ | partial | ❌ |
The 7 phases
1. CONTEXT vision (V1-V8) · discuss (5-7 questions or PRD)
↓
2. DISTILL compress context → deterministic 12-field XML brief
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3. INVESTIGATE deepplan (optional, 5 parallel sub-agents)
↓
4. PLAN plan (board.json + briefs) · planandwork (copy-paste prompts)
↓
5. EXECUTE autoexecute (parallel OS terminals) · or manual spawn
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6. VERIFY verify · review · adversarial · smoke (4 mechanical gates)
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7. CLOSE close (SIGNOFF.md) · ship (PR + release)
Each phase has commands. Each command writes artifacts. Each artifact is auditable.
Phase 1 — Context engineering (vision / discuss)
Before any code, you tell greenheart what you're building. Not by typing a one-liner into a prompt-box. By answering 5-8 structured questions that produce a permanent, version-controlled context document.
/greenheart:vision — project-, feature-, or phase-scope context (V1-V8 for projects)/greenheart:discuss — phase-level requirements (5-7 questions, or PRD-mode for critical tasks)
Phase 2 — Distill (distill)
