three-pillars

three-pillars

Three-pillars is the published canon for design-first AI-assisted development. One repo, three purposes: methodology writing (the canon), a Claude Code reference implementation (skills/ + agents/, installable today), and the source for the auto-generated Hermes distribution at CurtisThe/three-pillars-hermes (build pipeline planned, see CHANGELOG.md). The methodology is durable; the implementations propagate from it.

The discipline: design before plan before code, with council-based deliberation and audit gates at every phase. The bet: AI lets you ship code fast — three-pillars makes sure you're shipping the right code.

Install

Prerequisites: Claude Code installed on your machine.

Two commands in your terminal:

claude plugin marketplace add CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin
claude plugin install three-pillars@three-pillars

Restart Claude Code. That's it — 38 skills and 18 council agents are live.

Verify by typing /tp-guide in any project. If the skill runs, you're set.

Update

Releases ship new skills, bug fixes, and refinements. Check the releases page or the top of the commit log to see what's new.

claude plugin update three-pillars@three-pillars

Restart Claude Code after updating so the new skills are loaded. Your existing designs, plans, and session state are untouched — updates only replace the plugin's own files (skills/, agents/, CLAUDE.md, etc.).

Uninstall

claude plugin uninstall three-pillars@three-pillars
claude plugin marketplace remove CurtisThe/three-pillars-plugin

Your project's three-pillars-docs/tp-designs/ directories are not removed — those belong to your project, not the plugin.

Optional extras

Both extras are optional. The plugin's core features (skills, agents, session management) work without them.

Framework instructions — copy CLAUDE.md to ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md for the TDD pipeline methodology guide. Skills work without it, but CLAUDE.md gives Claude persistent context about the framework across all conversations.

Status line — a bash script that shows your context-window usage, active design, and git status in Claude Code's status line.

The plugin's shipped settings.json already references ~/.claude/statusline.sh:

"statusLine": { "type": "command", "command": "~/.claude/statusline.sh", "padding": 1 }

To enable it, copy the script into place (one-time, manual):

cp statusline.sh ~/.claude/statusline.sh
chmod +x ~/.claude/statusline.sh

If you skip this step: nothing breaks. Claude Code will try to run the command, silently fail (file not found), and render an empty status line. No functionality is lost.

Why ~/.claude/ and not inside the project? The status line is a user-global Claude Code feature, not per-project. It lives next to your user-wide settings.json and applies to every Claude Code session. The statusline.sh script itself is read-only: it reads git status, file-existence checks for .claude/last-design and three-pillars-docs/tp-designs/, and formats the output for your terminal. No network requests. No writes. See statusline.sh for the source (it's ~200 lines of bash).

Reviewer note: if you're auditing this plugin, the ~/.claude/statusline.sh path in settings.json is a user-scoped external dependency with graceful failure, not a silent install hook. It requires explicit user action to enable.

Why this exists

AI coding assistants are fast. The bottleneck is no longer writing code — it's writing the right code. Three-pillars adds the missing layers: a design-first pipeline that forces clarity before implementation, council-based deliberation that stress-tests decisions from multiple angles, and session continuity that preserves context across conversations and machines.

What's in this repo

Three layers, one source of truth:

• The canon (methodology writing) — this README.md, CONTRIBUTING.md, the CLAUDE.md framework guide, and the monthly cadence: METHODOLOGY.md (planned v1.6.0+), adoption/ guides, examples/ worked examples. Vendor-agnostic and host-agnostic — engage the methodology without installing anything.
• The Claude Code reference implementation — skills/ (37 tp-* skills + /council) and agents/ (18 council personas), installable via claude plugin install. The patterns the canon describes, made operational for Claude Code adopters.
• The Hermes-distribution source — scripts/build-hermes-distribution.py (planned) + a GitHub Action will transform skills/ into a Hermes-installable skill package at every release tag, force-pushed to CurtisThe/three-pillars-hermes. No drift by construction — humans never edit the downstream repo. See CHANGELOG.md for status.