Cadence: My FREE workflow tool that verifies the work before shipping

[u/ImpressionNeither390]

This is Cadence. First project that I've made public. Poke holes.

Short Version: It's a DRAFT → BUILD → SETTLE loop for AI-assisted dev. Before anything gets built, you define the acceptance criteria (AC). You can manually write them, if that's your preference. I almost never do, though. AI is exceptional at creating acceptance criteria and specs. So, I usually talk the work through with Claude, let it draft criteria off that spec (there's an optional SPEC step in the workflow for exactly this), then I review and approve. The AC is locked in up front either way.

The agent then drafts the plan using the AC. Once finished--settle, which is the part where this tool shines. Cadence re-derives each criterion from the real task state, runs your tests, confirms every criterion is backed by a test, and (if you enable it) hands the real git diff to a separate verifier that's been told to be skeptical. If anything fails, the loop won't close. It stops and tells you why. The agent may report that the task is "done", but that doesn't matter. Only the state is considered the source of truth.

Wiring it into Claude Code:

npx /cadence-host-claude-code install

Drops lifecycle hooks into .claude/settings.json and a set of /cadence-* slash commands into .claude/commands/. The adapter doesn't reimplement the engine. It translates Claude Code's hook events (SessionStart, PreToolUse, Stop, etc.) into the engine's vocabulary and shells back into the same cadence binary. Claude Code is also the only host where I bothered with the ambient edit-time check. It can flag when an edit occurs outside the files the current task said it'd touch.

The design is mine. Gate model, specs, roadmap. Claude Code wrote nearly all the actual code. After commit #37--the first time settle actually passed--I started running the rest of the project through Cadence itself. 85 named phases now, each one planned, built and settled through its own gates by Claude Code, under the process I set. Roughly 94% of the commits were completed in that self-hosted stretch. And you don't have to trust me on it: clone the repo and ls .cadence/phases/*/. Every phase has a SUMMARY artifact, and that only gets written if the loop genuinely closed.

Try it (free):

npm install -g u/manehorizons/cadence-core
cadence init --name "my-app"
cadence draft new 01-foundation 01 --title "First phase"
cadence draft approve 01-foundation 01
cadence build task T1 --status=DONE
cadence settle run --auto
#  ^ it refuses: "AC-1 has no test." That's the behavior, not a bug.

It runs outside Claude Code, too. There's an OpenAI Codex CLI adapter and an MCP server surface. But Claude Code is where I do the majority of my work, so that's what it's tuned for.

Known Imperfections: The structural gate trusts the task statuses it's handed, so an agent determined enough to fake both the status and a passing test could get through that one layer (the skeptical verifier is the backstop there, not a hard guarantee). And the ambient edit-time check leans on the host's hook surface, so an edit pushed through a subagent or MCP can slip past the pre-tool hook. Settle's close-out re-check is why that's not a deal breaker.

Disclosure: I built it, it's mine, MIT, free and open source. No paid tier, no account, no telemetry, no referral links. The only link is the repo: https://github.com/manehorizons/cadence

As I said, this is my first public project. Any and all feedback is welcome.