clavain

Clavain

Clavain is the reference Claude Code rig for Sylveste, the platform that orchestrates agents by human/machine comparative advantage. It codifies product and engineering discipline into composable workflows for building software from brainstorm to ship, using Claude, Codex, and Oracle-style second opinions where their different failure modes help. Through knowledge compounding, doc freshness monitoring, domain-aware agent generation, and session evidence capture, Clavain gets better at building your project the more you use it.

Before installing, point Claude Code at this directory and ask it to review the plugin against how you like to work. It's especially helpful to run /insights first so Claude Code can evaluate Clavain against your actual historical usage patterns.

Install

Want the full platform? Clavain is part of Sylveste, which installs the companion ecosystem, Go services, and TUI tools in one command. See the Sylveste Quick Start.

# Full rig install (recommended): installs Clavain + companions, MCP servers, env vars, and conflict resolution
npx @gensysven/agent-rig install mistakeknot/Clavain

# Plugin only (no companions or environment setup)
claude plugin install clavain@interagency-marketplace

# Local development
claude --plugin-dir /path/to/Clavain

Uninstall

# Remove Clavain + companions from Claude Code
bash scripts/uninstall.sh

# Remove Clavain only, keep companions
bash scripts/uninstall.sh --keep-companions

# Full platform uninstall (from Sylveste repo)
bash install.sh --uninstall

Prerequisites

Go 1.22+ is required — clavain-cli is a Go binary built from source. Install from go.dev/dl.

Codex install

Clavain can also run in Codex via native skill discovery and generated prompt wrappers.

Quick path:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/mistakeknot/Clavain/main/.codex/agent-install.sh | bash -s -- --update --json

Then restart Codex.

The default Codex bootstrap now installs the recommended Interverse companion set as well, not just Clavain itself.

Migrating from superpowers or compound-engineering? The ecosystem installer (install-codex-interverse.sh install) automatically removes known legacy prompt wrappers, legacy ~/.codex/skills/* artifacts (symlink or directory), and legacy superpowers clone artifacts with backup-first safety (~/.codex/.clavain-backups/<timestamp>/).

From a local clone:

make codex-refresh
make codex-doctor
make codex-doctor-json

Detailed guide: docs/README.codex.md
Single-file bootstrap target: .codex/INSTALL.md

Who this Is for

Clavain serves three concentric circles, inner circle first:

1. Personal rig. Optimized relentlessly for one product-minded engineer's workflow. The primary goal is to make a single person as effective as a full team without losing the fun parts of building.
2. Reference implementation. Shows what's possible with disciplined multi-agent engineering and sets conventions for plugin structure, skill design, and agent orchestration.
3. Research artifact. Demonstrates what disciplined human-AI collaboration looks like in practice by solving real problems under real constraints and publishing the results.

Clavain is not the best workflow for everyone, but it can, at the very least, provide some inspiration for your own approach to Claude Code.

Philosophy

Most agent tools skip the product phases: brainstorm, strategy, specification: and jump straight to code generation. Clavain makes them first-class. The brainstorm and strategy phases are real product capabilities, not engineering context-setting.

A few operating principles that shape every design decision:

Refinement > production. The review phases matter more than the building phases. Resolving ambiguity during planning is far cheaper than dealing with it during execution.

Composition > integration. Small, focused tools composed together beat large integrated platforms. The inter-* constellation, Unix philosophy, modpack metaphor: it's turtles all the way down.

Human attention is the bottleneck. Optimize for the human's time, not the agent's. Multi-agent output must be presented so humans can review quickly and confidently, not just cheaply.

Multi-AI > single-vendor. No one model is best at everything. Clavain is built on Claude Code and uses Codex and Oracle-style review as complements: architecturally multi-model while remaining platform-native.

Discipline before automation. Encode judgment into checks before removing the human. Agents without discipline ship slop.