building-in-the-open

building-in-the-open

Ask an AI agent to write three documents in the same session. You'll get three different voices, three different quality levels, and zero consistency.

That's fine for throwaway drafts. It's not fine for anything that reaches your repository.

building-in-the-open is a Claude Code plugin that fixes this with writer personas for consistent voice, quality gates for measurable standards, and an editorial firewall that catches tone drift, sarcasm, and assumed context before anything ships.

Whether you're a developer capturing the reasoning behind architectural decisions or a technical writer maintaining documentation—the problem is the same. AI agents need guardrails on their prose, not just their code. Technical writers are already discovering this—and so are UX writers and documentation teams.

Seven skills. Four writer personas. One tone firewall. Zero embarrassing commits.

What this is—and isn't

This produces development artifacts—the documentation that emerges during building: ADRs, design docs, handoffs, changelogs, end-user guides. If you need a documentation site generator, look at mdBook or Docusaurus. If you need the documents worth putting on that site, you're in the right place.

How it works

Three layers, loosely coupled:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  SKILLS (artifact-specific workflows)               │
│  curating-context, capturing-decisions, writing-    │
│  design-docs, writing-end-user-docs, writing-       │
│  changelogs, editorial-review, building-in-the-open │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  PERSONAS (composable voice layer)                  │
│  technical-writer, doc-writer, marketing-           │
│  copywriter, context-curator                        │
├─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┤
│  TOOLING (quality gates)                            │
│  bito: token counter, readability scorer,      │
│  completeness checker, path-based rules engine      │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Skills define what to produce. Personas define how to sound. Tooling enforces whether it's good enough to ship.

Each skill announces itself and its persona when invoked—so you always know which voice is active and why.

Installation

claude plugin add claylo-marketplace/building-in-the-open

Or install manually:

git clone https://github.com/claylo/building-in-the-open ~/.claude/plugins/building-in-the-open

Quality gates (optional but recommended):

brew install claylo/brew/bito # macOS / Linux, easiest
npm install -g @claylo/bito   # wraps the native binary
cargo binstall bito           # if you've got a rust environment

Verify: bito doctor

See the installation guide for pre-commit hooks, MCP server setup, and dialect configuration.

Quickstart

See the quickstart walkthrough for hands-on examples:

• Your first handoff — capture session context with quality gates
• Your first ADR — document an architectural decision
• The editorial review pipeline — the full draft-review-commit loop

Skills

Each skill lives in skills/<name>/SKILL.md and defines a complete workflow for one artifact type.

Skill	What it produces	Persona
building-in-the-open	Routing + bito setup and configuration	—
curating-context	Public handoffs + private memory	Context Curator
capturing-decisions	Architecture decision records (MADR 4.0.0)	Technical Writer
writing-design-docs	Design documents	Technical Writer
writing-end-user-docs	Tutorials, guides, API references	Doc Writer
writing-changelogs	CHANGELOG.md + release announcements	Technical Writer + Marketing Copywriter
editorial-review	Pass/fail quality review	None (reviewer, not writer)

Skills are superpowers-aware—if the superpowers plugin is installed, workflow integration happens automatically. If not, every skill works standalone.

Personas

Personas are voice guides stored in personas/<name>.md. They tell an agent how to write—not what to say, but how to sound saying it.