Quickstart

Install#

npx greenline init        # inside any Git repository

This creates .green-line/ (your project's durable state), installs the skills for both Codex and Claude Code, and adds a managed block to AGENTS.md/CLAUDE.md. Prefer a lean install? --profile starter ships the pipeline spine plus the working-law skills instead of the full corpus. Commit everything init writes: the artifacts are project state, and Git is their history.

Your first conversation#

Open your coding agent in the repo and just talk:

"What were we doing?": the agent reads project state from .green-line/work/ and tells you where things stand. On a fresh workspace it says so honestly instead of inventing.
"I want to build …": a real feature starts the pipeline. The agent grills you, records decisions, writes a spec, cuts tickets, and builds test-first. Every step leaves a file you can read.
"Fix the typo in the README": small settled changes skip the ceremony (the light path): the agent just builds it, recording one micro-initiative with one ticket so even quick fixes leave evidence.

Note
You stay in charge. The agent asks before anything mutating: claiming a ticket, publishing a spec, advancing a status, committing.

The three commands you'll actually run#

greenline status    # where the project stands: initiatives, tickets, frontier
greenline doctor    # is the workspace healthy? every problem has a code and a cure
greenline sync      # after upgrading the CLI: regenerate managed output

All offline, all idempotent, all --json-capable. doctor is worth running before trusting any artifact you're about to build on; agents do this themselves, and you can too.

What lives where#

.green-line/work/<initiative>/   decisions, spec, tickets, reviews, evidence
.green-line/DECISIONS.md         the product decisions book (grows at initiative close)
.green-line/diagrams/            diagrams, per initiative
.green-line/map/                 the versioned architecture map
AGENTS.md / CLAUDE.md            your files; Green Line owns one bounded block

.green-line/work/007-sso/
├─ initiative.md
├─ decisions.md
├─ spec.md
├─ tickets/TKT-001.md … TKT-003.md
├─ evidence/TKT-001/
└─ reviews/

consumespins the exact revision it was built from; staleness is detected
depends_onthe edges; a ticket with none open is on the frontier
result_committhe evidence, reviewable as a committed range

One initiative on disk: the tree, one opened ticket, and the three fields that carry the system.

Everything is Markdown you can open, read, and (outside the managed regions) edit. Next: the pipeline.