anvil

smithy

A personal Claude Code plugin marketplace. The workshop that holds the tools.

Today it ships one plugin:

anvil — shape work without watching it

anvil is a non-invasive, operator-scoped agent pipeline:

Plan. Run. Review. Ship. Don't watch.

It turns an idea into a near-mergeable draft PR by walking a spec through plan → critique → adjudicate → dispatch → review → fix, with a beads issue graph as the work-item store and Claude Code Workflows doing the cognitive fan-out.

The defining constraint: zero repo imposition. All of anvil's state lives out-of-repo and operator-scoped ($BEADS_DIR, ~/.anvil/specs/). anvil never commits a .beads file into your target repo, never edits its CLAUDE.md, and never makes a change your teammates have to see. You can plan, critique, and run work against any repo — including worktree-heavy ones — without touching it.

Install

/plugin marketplace add ~/repositories/smithy      # or: <github-owner>/smithy
/plugin install anvil@smithy

Then run /anvil:setup — it installs beads (if missing), stands up the operator-scoped store, persists BEADS_DIR with your consent, and proves the install touched no repo. (Manual equivalent: plugins/anvil/bootstrap/install-beads.sh + export BEADS_DIR="$HOME/.anvil/beads".)

Prerequisites: bd (beads) or br (beads_rust) on PATH, plus gh and claude. See plugins/anvil/README.md for the full walkthrough and plugins/anvil/LEARNINGS.md for the portable engineering lessons this plugin encodes.

Usage

anvil is five slash commands. Run setup once, then walk an idea through the loop:

/anvil:setup        # one-time: install beads operator-scoped, prove zero repo imposition
/anvil:plan         # turn an idea (or a plan-mode plan) into a locked spec + beads issue
/anvil:critique     # two independent critics + a synthesizer harden the spec
/anvil:adjudicate   # you resolve the cruxes; decisions fold back into the spec, then it locks
/anvil:dispatch     # headless build → quality gate → DRAFT PR → review → one auto-fix → stop

The loop stops at a draft PR — you adjudicate the merge; anvil never auto-merges. All state stays out-of-repo ($BEADS_DIR, ~/.anvil/specs/); your target repo is never touched. Each command works standalone, so you can also jump straight to /anvil:dispatch against an existing bd ready frontier.

---

Why this exists (the experiment)

anvil is the bare-parts arm of a deliberate experiment. The sibling project Forge is a TypeScript app that implements this same loop as a bespoke CLI. Forge's ADR-0030 asks an uncomfortable question: now that Claude Code ships Workflows, Routines, and subagents — and beads ships the dependency graph — does Forge's value reassemble from bare parts, or does building the app still earn its keep?

anvil is how we find out. It reassembles Forge's loop using only skills, Workflows, subagents, beads, gh, and headless claude — and never shells out to the forge binary (doing so would invalidate the test). Two surfaces are expected to be where the answer lives:

• operator-scope / worktree-safety / zero-imposition — can bare beads ($BEADS_DIR, contributor mode) actually deliver repo-untouched, multi-repo, worktree-safe planning? Or does assembling it reinvent Forge?
• adjudication write-back — beads viewers are read-only; resolving spec cruxes is a genuine write surface (/anvil:adjudicate).

If the bare stack reassembles into Forge, Forge is the product. If a plugin like this gets you ~90% there, the plugin is the product. Either answer is a win; the point is to find it honestly.

---

License

Apache 2.0 © 2026 Tripp Cashel — see LICENSE and NOTICE.