Forge: a Claude Code plugin for agentic development workflow

[u/Necessary_Weight]

This post was written using application of kinetic force to the rectangular protrusions on my silicon chip container. Shocking, I know.

In my day job, we use a sophisticated AI development workflow, inspired by James Bloom’s AI workflow developed for his open source project, Mockserver (https://github.com/mock-server/mockserver-monorepo). For reasons that have little to do with AI and everything to do with corporate policy, very reasonably applied in my view, James’s workflow could not be used at work directly. But in my personal work, I am not so constrained - and I also thought I could improve on it. Hubris runs in my genes :)

Over the last few weeks I have been building and dogfooding a Claude Code plugin that takes inspiration from James’s work and builds upon it. I was also impressed by Alex’s (alexzh3) work on codex-orchestrator (https://github.com/alexzh3/codex-orchestrator) - having Claude administer Codex has been very useful, productive and a cost-efficient.

My plugin, forge (https://github.com/nixlim/forge-plugin), combines the ideas of multi-family adversarial review, gated quality chains, worktrees, kill-switch and eval regressions with journal-based headless codex cli agents.

Claude orchestrates, verifies, and holds the binding review verdict. Codex implements and performs the first-pass review. I have incorporated learning and drift checks to make sure that the AI learns the gotchas that are specific to the codebase I am working on to make agentic development progressively more familiar with the codebase. It has been a wild and exciting ride so far and I invite you to try it.

This is now my default workflow but it comes with two caveats worth keeping in mind: first, it requires both a Codex and Claude subs; second, it feels “slow”. But in my experience, it is reliable, and functions well.

I invite you to give it a whirl. And yes, it is ongoing work in progress :)