SHADE kit runs AI coding agents through a gated feature workflow: from a raw requirement to a clarified spec, a plan, the implementation, and a verified result with a report. It is built for small teams of 2–5 developers who work on features in parallel, each on its own branch, with Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, or OpenAI Codex CLI.
Status: in development. Most commands described here are planned; today the CLI provides
shade-kit version,shade-kit init, and the feature commandsshade-kit feature new,list,current,set,show, anddrop.
SHADE kit has two parts. The skills are the prompts the agent follows; the shade-kit CLI is the memory and the referee.
- Skills (
skills/): one skill per phase plus shared skills for interviews, gate checks, research, and reviews. They are installed once per machine for each agent (shade-kit integrations install), never into a repository. - Engine (
shade-kit): a .NET CLI that keeps the feature state in.shadekit/inside the repository, committed and merged with the code. Agents call it with--json. - Phases:
new→refine→map→plan→implement→verify→finishin thefeatureprofile. Thebugfixprofile replacesrefineandmapwithdiagnose; thequickprofile runsnew→quick→finishfor small changes. - Gates: the human approves every phase transition. The Definition of Ready guards
plan, the Definition of Done guardsfinish; each gate can be switched off per repository. - Traceability: requirements get stable IDs and are mapped to the tests that prove them;
finishcan write a report with requirements, tests, check results, and approvals (reportinconfig.json).
SHADE kit never commits, pushes, or opens pull requests; that stays with the developer.
Design notes: concept, skills, and the v1 feature packages.
The build uses Cake with CreativeCoders.CakeBuild (project in build/). It needs the .NET 10 SDK and the full git history, because GitVersion derives the version from it.
./build.sh -t pack # build, test, coverage report and the dotnet tool package
./build.sh -t smoketest -t createdistpackages # self-contained single-file binaries for the host OS, smoke test, archivesOn Windows use build.cmd or build.ps1. Results land in .artifacts/ and .tests/.
A release is a tag v<SemVer> on main; the release workflow publishes the tool package to nuget.org and creates a GitHub release with binaries for osx-arm64, linux-x64, linux-arm64, win-x64 and win-arm64.