Spacedock

Spacedock runs agent work through defined stages, so you can delegate in batches and make only the calls that need your judgment.

The first officer coordinates the flow: it dispatches workers to advance each work item and surfaces approval-worthy decisions to you, the captain, so batches move forward without pulling you into every session.

You want Spacedock if:

• You're a human tired of context-switching between agent sessions to make approval decisions. Spacedock batches the decisions an agent wants to hand back to you and presents each with evidence, so you approve or redirect without re-loading context.
• You're an agent delegating repeatable work and want a structured place to queue up approval-worthy decisions for your human without interrupting them for every tiny step.

What's Different

• Approval gates with structured evidence. Every gate comes with a stage report: findings, verdicts, artifacts, anomalies. You approve, redirect, or bounce back faster than sifting through raw output or a sprawling log.
• Adversarial review gates. Review stages can be configured to push back rather than rubber-stamp. They target sycophancy, thin evidence, and work that looks busy without proving its claim. Work clears the gate when it survives the challenge.
• Plan in batches, decide as work flows back. Queue multiple work items at once; agents advance each through its stages independently while you handle approvals as they surface.
• The workflow learns with you. The first officer helps you adjust it when patterns emerge: a stage that never fires, a gate that keeps bouncing the same issue back, a schema field that always ends up empty.
• Isolation when needed. Stages that touch shared state run in their own git worktree; lightweight stages run inline. You declare which is which, and the first officer enforces it.
• Work doesn't die at the context limit. When an agent runs out of context, Spacedock swaps in a successor that carries forward what's in flight. Nothing gets lost in the handoff.

Quick Start

Prerequisites: Claude Code or Codex CLI.

Claude Code

1. claude plugin marketplace add clkao/spacedock

2. claude plugin install spacedock

3. Start a first-officer session and commission your workflow in one command:

   claude --agent spacedock:first-officer "/spacedock:commission <your mission prompt>"
   

Codex CLI

1. Clone Spacedock and expose its skills under the Codex skills namespace:

   git clone https://github.com/clkao/spacedock.git /path/to/spacedock
   mkdir -p ~/.agents/skills
   ln -s /path/to/spacedock/skills ~/.agents/skills/spacedock
   

   This makes ~/.agents/skills/spacedock/first-officer/SKILL.md and ~/.agents/skills/spacedock/ensign/SKILL.md resolve to the cloned repo: the layout the Codex runtime adapters expect.

2. Start Codex interactively with multi-agent enabled, then prompt it to use the first-officer skill and commission your workflow:

   codex --enable multi_agent
   

   At the prompt: Use the spacedock:first-officer skill to run /spacedock:commission <your mission prompt> in this directory.

Codex multi-agent is experimental. The Claude Code path is the primary supported surface.

Example workflows

Email triage: claude --agent spacedock:first-officer "/spacedock:commission Email triage: fetch, categorize, and act on Gmail inbox. Entity: a batch of up to 50 emails. Stages: intake (use gws-cli, triage in:inbox and read email body if necessary, categorize, propose action per email, output as table) → approval (Captain reviews proposal) -> execute (carry out approved actions, do not mark as read). Use gws-cli (https://github.com/googleworkspace/cli/tree/main/skills/gws-gmail), GOOGLE_WORKSPACE_CLI_CONFIG_DIR=~/.config/gws/<account> for different accounts. Walk me through gws-cli setup if not already done."

Superpowers-style dev task workflow: claude --agent spacedock:first-officer "/spacedock:commission Dev task workflow: superpowers-style design → plan → implement → review with ## Design and ## Implementation Plan inlined in the entity body (no separate spec/plan files), implement on isolated worktrees with strict TDD, design and review gated for approval."

What a Work Item Looks Like

---
id: 054
title: Session debrief command
status: done
---

Problem statement, design notes, acceptance criteria, and stage reports
all live in the body of this file as the work moves through stages.

See a completed example from Spacedock's own workflow.

Concepts

"I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul." -- William Ernest Henley, Invictus

How It Works

The first officer reads the workflow README, checks work item statuses, and dispatches ensigns for items ready to advance. Stages that need isolation (typically implementation work with commits) run inside their own git worktree; lightweight stages (design, review, triage) run inline. At approval gates the first officer pauses and presents the ensign's stage report for your review: approve, redo with feedback, or reject. Rejected work automatically bounces back for revision in a fresh round of the earlier stage, with a hard cap so you never get stuck in an infinite loop. When you end a session, /spacedock:debrief captures what happened (commits, task state changes, decisions, open issues) into a record the next session picks up automatically (see an example debrief from a real session).

What Gets Generated

When you run /spacedock:commission, the following files are added to your workflow directory:

• {dir}/README.md: workflow schema, stage definitions, and work item template
• {dir}/*.md: seed work item files
• {dir}/_mods/: local modifications carried across refits

Shipped by the Spacedock plugin:

• spacedock:first-officer: the orchestrator agent that reads workflow state and dispatches ensigns
• spacedock:ensign: the worker agent dispatched to do stage work
• skills/commission/bin/status: read and advance workflow state without switching to a separate tracking tool

The generated workflow README is the single source of truth. The first officer reads it to know what stages exist, what quality criteria to enforce, and when to pause for your review.

Workflows can extend their own behavior via markdown mod files (_mods/*.md) that declare hook handlers for lifecycle events like startup, idle, or merge. For example, the pr-merge mod opens a pull request automatically when a completed worktree branch is ready to land.

When a new Spacedock release is available, use /spacedock:refit to upgrade your workflow scaffolding while keeping local modifications.

Tips

• Run Spacedock inside a sandbox. Recommended: agent-safehouse (macOS), packnplay, a devcontainer, or a VM.
• Talk directly to an ensign. Claude Code supports agent team chat: while a dispatched ensign is running, you can Shift+Up / Shift+Down to switch panes and give the ensign feedback directly instead of routing everything through the first officer.

Use Cases

• Email triage: classify and route incoming messages with AI agents, escalate to a human at review gates
• Dev task workflow: superpowers-style design -> plan -> implement -> review with approval gates
• Content publishing: manage drafts through editing, review, and publication stages
• Research workflows: process papers or data through analysis, synthesis, and validation
• Dogfooding Spacedock's own development. Spacedock is self-hosted. Its own development runs on a plain text workflow at docs/plans/. Run skills/commission/bin/status --workflow-dir docs/plans to see the current state.

License

Spacedock is released under the Apache License 2.0.