cortex-command · landing.spec.mdR3 · live document · MIT · v2.0.0
A Claude Code harness that earns its autonomy.
Deep research, then interrogation — until the spec is extracted from your head onto the page. An orchestrator agent with a tight spec and a solid harness can be trusted to work while you sleep.
01
/discovery fires it off
One prompt. Discovery clarifies ambiguities, reviews adversarially, and spawns one ticket per scoped piece of work.
02
/refine each ticket separately
Refinement turns a scoped ticket into a buildable spec. Each ticket lands with shared scope, cited prior art, and pinned acceptance criteria — the things that prevent rework once code starts.
03
Earn the spec, pick the harness.
specs/ · 4 ready
nightline-loopLR3
dawn-revealMR2
tackle-progressionXLR5
weather-tablesSR1
option a · overnight harness
ships by morning, while you sleep
/overnight batches it. A scheduled overnight process runs on the CLI and orchestrates the full pipeline — with safeguards and error handling — then /morning-review hands you a full summary of what was done.
option b · guided lifecycle
ships with you, in-session
One ticket at a time, planned and shipped with you in the terminal. Optionally runs in an isolated worktree so your working tree stays clean.
§02 · lifecycle playground
The same lifecycle, three different gate sequences.
Frontmatter declares complexity and criticality. Those two values decide which gates fire. Drag the slider — a ghost-train runs the new sequence so you can see exactly which phases the framework runs.
simplecomplexcritical
small change, low blast radius. skip the review gate; ship in one pass.
§03 · /refine writes the spec · scrolls to lock4 gates · 0 of 4 cleared
What does it feel like to set a nightline well? Player loop: choose tackle → cast at dusk → set depth → leave the line → return at dawn. Fish simulated overnight. Catch determined by depth, bait, weather, patience. Scope-in: a satisfying choice + a morning the night actually paid for.
Tackle: 3 rod tiers, 6 lure types, 4 bait types. Depth: 1–5 fathoms. Weather modifies catch table per fathom. Overnight simulation: discrete tick at midnight resolves bites against a Markov model parameterized by depth/bait/weather. Morning UI: animated reveal of the line being pulled. Edge cases: empty, snagged, legendary.
§ 04
3/3risks named
R3
phase complete
Plan phase 04/critical-review available before approval
Implementation: (a) tackle data model + UI, (b) cast/set screen, (c) overnight resolver, (d) dawn reveal animation, (e) catch encyclopedia. Acceptance: a player who sets a line and sleeps wakes to a result that feels earned. Risk: the resolver carries the loop. Mock it badly and the loop collapses.
§04 · the overnight payoff · scroll to scrub
If a spec earns it, this is what handoff looks like.
spawns 4 research branches in parallel — one rail per reference signal
each ticket runs in its own claude window · clears spec → research → critical-review before a plan is approved
merges PRs · closes lifecycles · drops a morning-report.md you can skim with coffee
spec earned
lifecycle/{slug}/spec.md
all four phases locked. the orchestrator now has a tight enough spec to work without you.
/discovery — fan-out
lifecycle-research/{topic}/*.md
spawns research branches in parallel — one rail per reference signal.
discovery converges into named, refinable tickets.
/refine — per ticket
clarify · research · spec · plan · critical-review
each ticket clears its own gates. five tickets → five tight specs.
→ tackle data model
→ cast/set screen
→ overnight resolver
→ dawn reveal anim
→ catch encyclopedia
/overnight — parallel rails
overnight-state.json · MCP server
orchestrator runs the tickets in parallel. read_spec → advance_phase per ticket. branches and PRs created as they pass critical-review.
/morning-review — converge
lifecycle/morning-report.md
merges PRs · closes lifecycles · drops a report you can skim with coffee.
draw
discoveryrefinenightdawn
—
—
§05 · /overnight · operational guarantees
Inside /overnight · the safety contract.
Knows when to stop.
Three independent counters watch the run. zero_progress trips when nothing has advanced in 5 rounds. time trips at 10 hours. failures trips when the same ticket keeps blowing up. Any one of them ends the run cleanly — saves state, writes the report, exits — instead of churning until your wallet or your repo notices.
three circuit breakers · zero-progress · time · watchdog
Climbs when stuck — stops calmly when it can't.
Failed gates don't loop blindly. The first retry runs on the same model; the next escalates to opus; the third hands off to a separate brain agent that decides SKIP, DEFER, or continue.
When even the brain can't decide cleanly, the harness writes ./deferred/<ticket>.md with what it tried and what it needs from you — then carries on with the rest of the queue. Three rungs, a judge, one calm exit.
retry → escalate → triage → calm pause
Stays in its lane.
Each ticket runs in its own git worktree on its own branch. The agent can’t reach main, can’t touch packed-refs, can’t read other repos, and has its tool list pinned ahead of time. The fence is enforced at the seatbelt layer, not asked-for politely — the agent literally cannot do the things outside it.
sandboxed by design · seatbelt-enforced
Schedules around conflicts. Heals what slips through.
Conflicts are mostly prevented before they happen. /overnight reads each ticket's file list and groups tickets into rounds so no two tickets in the same round touch the same file — and dependencies wait for their predecessors to finish. When a conflict still slips through, the harness uses a graded heal: trivial conflicts (whitespace, imports, non-overlapping hunks) take a fast-path stamp; real conflicts get exactly one bounded repair attempt, then defer. No infinite repair loops, no surprise force-pushes.
round scheduler · graded heal
Survives interruption.
Every phase transition writes overnight-state.json atomically before continuing. Close your laptop mid-run, lose power, kill the process — on restart, interrupt.py reads the last checkpoint, reconciles any half-finished branch, and resumes from exactly where it left off. No double-merges, no orphaned worktrees, no lost work.
atomic state · resumes cleanly
Tells you everything it did.
Five JSONL streams record everything during the run: phase transitions, agent spawns, retries, conflicts, and brain triage decisions. At dawn they’re collated into a single morning-report.md — what merged, what was skipped and why, what’s waiting for you. Every decision is auditable; nothing happens off the record.
five logs · one morning-report
fig 9 · gatefold · the overnight harness · claude code sdk inside
one harness.
dusk → night → dawn
22:00
dusk · refine + plan
dusk · 22:00
refine queue · overnight plan written · runner detaches
3 specs ready · plan.md immutable · cortex overnight start detaches as a Python process.
Start with the skills. Add overnight when you want autonomy.
01required · start here
cortex-core
The interactive lifecycle — /discovery, /refine, /critical-review, /lifecycle — installed as a Claude Code plugin. Start here. Run /lifecycle on a real ticket to feel the gates with you in the loop.
The autonomous half. Installing this plugin auto-bundles the cortex CLI (cortex overnight / cortex morning-review) and an MCP server (read_spec, advance_phase, list_lifecycles) so any MCP-speaking agent can read Cortex state. Skip it if you only want gated lifecycles in-session.