Flow-Next

Repeatable agentic engineering.

The workflow layer for AI coding agents: durable specs, re-anchored workers, adversarial reviews, receipts. Everything lives in your repo. Zero external dependencies. Uninstall: rm -rf .flow/.

📖 Full doc index → · 🌐 flow-next.dev · 👥 Teams guide · 💬 Discord

Why this exists

Agentic engineering compresses implementation from weeks to hours — and quietly removes every safety valve pre-agentic Agile relied on. The standups, the hallway clarification, the mid-flight course correction that used to finish a vague ticket over a two-week cycle: gone. When an agent can ship the task in one sitting, a rough ticket plus a chat scrollback is the whole work surface.

That work surface fails predictably. Agents drift mid-task, forget requirements, overfit to recent context, and hand reviewers 10K-line diffs with no focus signal. The bottleneck didn't disappear — it moved upstream, to requirements, review, and verification. The spec has to carry the weight.

Flow-Next fixes the operating model, not just the prompt. It turns rough intent into durable specs, specs into context-sized task graphs, task graphs into re-anchored worker runs, and implementation into reviewed PRs with receipts. Between idea and merge it defines six named handover objects — each reviewable on its own, verified by a different model, and frozen at handover.

The artifact chain is not bureaucracy. It is the conversation that would otherwise be missing.

What you get

Flow-Next is an AI agent orchestration plugin: 28 agent-native skills covering the full lifecycle — idea → spec → tasks → review → ship → maintain — layered on a bundled pure-stdlib Python CLI (flowctl). The host agent is the intelligence; flowctl is the deterministic plumbing. No external services, no SaaS, no global config.

And one tenet about trust: everything lives in your repo under .flow/. Specs, tasks, memory, receipts — all of it is yours, in git, code-reviewable. Uninstall is rm -rf .flow/.

Quick start

Install

/plugin marketplace add \
  https://github.com/gmickel/flow-next
/plugin install flow-next
/reload-plugins
/flow-next:setup

git clone https://github.com/gmickel/flow-next.git
cd flow-next
./scripts/install-codex.sh flow-next
# then: /flow-next:setup

droid plugin marketplace add \
  https://github.com/gmickel/flow-next
# /plugins → install flow-next

Why a script for Codex? Codex's plugin protocol only registers skills from plugin.json — not custom .toml agents or hooks. install-codex.sh merges all 21 agents + hooks into ~/.codex/config.toml. Idempotent — safe to re-run. Full platform matrix + community ports in docs/platforms.md.

Grok Build (xAI)? If flow-next is already installed in Claude Code, Grok Build picks it up automatically — grok inspect shows the skills + hook loaded, zero extra setup. The /flow-next:* commands run when typed and the multi-agent flows work (a full /flow-next:plan fanned out all seven scout subagents end-to-end, verified). Grok's slash autocomplete + grok inspect just under-list flow-next's commands/agents — cosmetic, they work when invoked. (Don't grok plugin install the repo — it's a marketplace, not a single plugin.) See docs/platforms.md.

The 5-command happy path

/flow-next:capture                   # 1. Synthesize conversation → .flow/specs/<id>.md
/flow-next:plan <spec-id>            # 2. Break the spec into dependency-ordered tasks
/flow-next:work <spec-id>            # 3. Execute tasks in fresh-context worker subagents
/flow-next:make-pr <spec-id>         # 4. Render a cognitive-aid PR body (9 input streams)
/flow-next:resolve-pr <PR#>          # 5. Fetch review threads → triage → resolve

That's the inner loop. Branch in (/flow-next:prospect for ranked candidates, /flow-next:interview for structured discovery), branch out (/flow-next:pilot + /flow-next:land for the autonomous assembly line, /flow-next:ralph-init for hardened overnight runs, /flow-next:audit for memory garbage collection).

A /flow-next:plan result: dependency-ordered tasks, cross-model review iterated to SHIP, key decisions documented.

How the flow works

flowchart LR
    Idea([💡 Idea]) --> P[/flow-next:prospect/]
    Idea --> C[/flow-next:capture/]
    P --> C
    P -.->|direct via promote| L[/flow-next:plan/]
    C --> L
    C --> I[/flow-next:interview/]
    I --> L
    L --> W[/flow-next:work/]
    W --> R[/flow-next:impl-review/]
    R -->|SHIP| Q[/flow-next:qa/]
    R -->|NEEDS_WORK| W
    Q -->|YES| Done([🚀 Ship])
    Q -->|NO| W

    Done -.maintenance.-> A[/flow-next:audit/]
    A -.-> M[(.flow/memory/)]

/flow-next:qa is an opt-in live-app QA stage (after work, before make-pr) — it drives the deployed app like a real user and only runs when there's a live deploy + a driver; with neither it surfaces the limitation rather than blocking. It augments, never replaces CI/staging/manual QA: the cheap first live pass that catches obvious runtime breakage before a human opens the PR. Run it by hand, or wire it into the autonomous loop as the optional pipeline.qa pilot stage (flowctl config set pipeline.qa on, default off) — plan → plan-review → work → qa → make-pr.

The loop is spec-driven. Each step below maps to one skill; click through to flow-next.dev for the full page.

1. Capture or prospect a spec

Either synthesize an existing conversation into a structured spec, or — when starting from scratch — generate ranked candidate ideas grounded in the repo. Both land in .flow/specs/<id>.md. Capture source-tags every acceptance criterion as [user] / [paraphrase] / [inferred] and runs a mandatory read-back — you see exactly how much of the spec the agent invented before anything is written.

/flow-next:capture                    # from a conversation
/flow-next:prospect <focus-hint>      # from a focus hint (concept, path, constraint, volume)

→ flow-next.dev/skills/capture · flow-next.dev/skills/prospect

2. Interview to refine

Deep Q&A pass over a spec or task: lead-with-recommendation, confidence tiers, codebase-first investigation. Use it to flesh out an ambiguous spec before breaking it down. --scope=business|technical|both symmetrically narrows the pass — the same skill serves the PO filling the business layer and the tech lead filling the technical layer, on the same spec file.

/flow-next:interview <spec-id>

→ flow-next.dev/skills/interview

3. Plan into dependency-ordered tasks

Research the codebase via parallel scouts, then write the spec + tasks together. Tasks fn-N.M declare blockers, inherit context from the parent spec, and declare which acceptance criteria they satisfy (satisfies: [R1, R3]). This skill does not write code — only the plan.

/flow-next:plan <spec-id>             # or <free-form text>

→ flow-next.dev/skills/plan

4. Work through the tasks

Execute tasks systematically: each runs in a fresh-context worker subagent, re-anchors against the spec before starting, th