Getting started
Introduction
What agent-kit is, what it is not, and the problems it solves.
agent-kit is a minimal harness for agent-driven development with Claude Code. It has two parts:
- An npx CLI (
npx @razcue/agent-kit) that sets a project up from fixed questions and writes plain files:agent-kit.json, a managed block inAGENTS.md,.claude/settings.json,.knowledge/,work/,scripts/and, for new projects, a scaffold. - A Claude Code plugin (
agent-kit@agent-kit) with skills, hooks, a read-only reviewer agent and zero-dependency scripts. It is versioned and installed from this repository's marketplace.
Why it exists
Agents read whatever you load into every session and forget everything else. Without a harness, projects drift into the same failures:
| Failure | What agent-kit does |
|---|---|
A huge AGENTS.md loaded every session | A short managed block; procedures in skills (loaded on demand), facts in knowledge (only summaries load). agent-kit context measures the cost. |
| Rules written as prose | Hooks and checks: the git guard blocks git commands your flow forbids; preflight blocks unsafe merges. |
| Helpers rebuilt every time | A script registry: search before writing, keep and document what is reused. |
| Sessions that forget | A checkpoint after every turn and a "resume" section at the start of the next session. |
| Specs that rot | Living specs per capability, changed only through approved changes, with every scenario traced to a test. |
| Manual QA from memory | A QA checklist generated from the living specs and test data that grows with them. |
Principles
- Profile, not inference. Your technical level, language, method and git flow are answered once; nothing is guessed from the code.
- Enforce, don't request. Anything a machine can check becomes a hook, a script or a permission rule.
- Small context. Every skill, rule and knowledge entry must earn the tokens it costs per session.
- No runtime dependencies. The CLI and plugin scripts use Node built-ins only (Node ≥ 20.11).
- Claude Code only. The kit uses Claude Code's plugins, skills, hooks and settings directly.
Next
- Install it in a new or existing project.
- Read how lanes and methods shape every request.