devague

devague is a command-line tool that turns a vague feature idea into a buildable spec, then that spec into a buildable plan — by working backwards, then forwards. It is a small, deterministic Python CLI (no LLM calls inside it, fully unit-tested) — not an agent, service, or daemon. You install it and run devague from the repository you are speccing; state is plain JSON under .devague/.

vague idea ──▶ buildable spec ──▶ buildable plan ──▶ build

Install

uv tool install devague      # or: pipx install devague / pip install devague
devague --version

Two engines, one CLI

• Frame engine (idea→spec) — start from the announcement ("pretend it shipped"), capture and pressure-test claims, park open vagueness, and export a spec only once the frame converges. Flat verbs: devague new / capture / interrogate / confirm / converge / export / …
• Plan engine (spec→plan) — seed a plan from a converged frame, cover every target with tasks that carry acceptance criteria and an acyclic dependency order, and export a plan only once it converges. Nested group: devague plan new / task / cover / converge / export / …

Run devague learn (or devague plan learn) to learn the method, and devague explain <move> for any single move.

Human Review Loop

LLM-proposed claims and honesty conditions stay proposed until you confirm them — that anti-fabrication rule is the point of the method. The review loop makes that human step ergonomic at scale:

devague review                 # list every proposed (unconfirmed) item, with ids
devague review --json          # same, structured
devague confirm c2 h1 h3       # confirm many ids in one transactional call
devague reject c4 c5           # reject many ids in one call
devague confirm --from-review .devague/reviews/<slug>.md   # apply an edited review file

review is not gated on convergence and never mutates state. It writes a durable, explicitly non-authoritative artifact you can review out of band, then apply: each item is emitted with a pending marker — change it to confirm or reject and feed the file back with confirm --from-review. pending lines are never auto-confirmed; a batch is transactional (one bad id ⇒ nothing changes).

Open questions / pending decisions live as durable working state too:

devague question "should batch confirm be transactional?"   # record a pending decision
devague question --list                                     # review them
devague question --resolve q1 --decision "yes, transactional"

Applying a resolved decision into the frame stays an explicit move (e.g. devague capture --kind decision "…" then devague confirm).

.devague/ — what's committed vs working state

Path	Committed?
.devague/frames/, .devague/plans/	yes — the converged frame/plan state
.devague/reviews/<slug>.md	no — local review working state
.devague/questions/<slug>.md	no — local pending-decision working state
.devague/current, .devague/current_plan	no — local pointers

devague keeps reviews/ and questions/ out of git for you (it manages .gitignore). Promote one into docs/ only if you intentionally want it committed.

Driving it from an agent

Inside AgentCulture, an assistant drives this CLI through a family of operator skills that cover the seven-leg flow end to end, in order: /scope (idea→explored scope, the optional opening leg), /think (idea→spec), /challenge (a risk-scaled blind-spot discovery pass between /think and /spec-to-plan), /spec-to-plan (spec→plan), /assign-to-workforce (plan→parallel implementation), /deviate (the execution-time leg — stop an in-flight fan-out the moment it must diverge from the confirmed plan, get explicit human approval via devague deviate, and resume), and /summarize-delivery (execution→a committed accountability artifact). /challenge is method-only — no wrapper script, no new CLI verb; findings route through the same moves /think already uses. The CLI-driving pair — /think and /spec-to-plan — add a portable wrapper and a status next-move helper over the convergence gate; the CLI is the deterministic affordance and the agent decides the next move.

These skills serve two audiences: operators — the main agent that drives the deterministic CLI move by move across all seven legs — and the humans who own the three standing gates: the exported spec, the go/no-go on the implementation split plan (including any mid-run deviation approved against it via /deviate), and the final PR review. See CLAUDE.md for that workflow and docs/superpowers/specs/ for the design docs.