nightwright

nightwright turns ideas into shipped code. You capture ideas and explore them until they're clear. You then write them up as short specs with testable acceptance criteria, and hand those specs to an agentic loop that implements, tests, reviews and merges them, coming back to you only when it needs a decision. Along the way, nightwright sees the passive time you spend on each topic.

flowchart LR
    subgraph p1["① Ideas to specs — you, with agents"]
        direction LR
        C["Capture"] --> X["Explore"] --> S["Spec"] --> R["Review"]
    end
    subgraph p2["② The agentic loop — unattended"]
        direction LR
        Q["Queue"] --> I["Implement"] --> G["Gates"] --> V["Review"] --> M["Merge"]
        G -. fix .-> I
        V -. fix .-> I
    end
    R --> Q
    M --> D(["Shipped, with the<br/>whole story in a ledger"])
    p2 -. "parks with a reason<br/>when it needs you" .-> H(["You"])

• Ideas to specs

  ---

  Capture a thought in seconds, explore it until it's fully fledged, and write a spec that says exactly what "done" means: decision, acceptance criteria, test plan.

• The agentic loop

  ---

  A small, deterministic machine around fresh persona runs. It implements, runs your tests, reviews against the spec and merges, with bounded loops, cost caps and a clear escalation ladder.

• Bootstrap from zero

  ---

  Nine steps with a check after each: install, configure, register a project, and watch your first spec get built and merged.

• Run the agentic loop

  ---

  The everyday path: register projects, start the runner, launch the conductor and a steward per project, queue specs and watch them merge.

• Track time

  ---

  Passive time per topic from your Claude Code / Cursor transcripts and meetings. No timer for that signal.

What you get

Ideas you own	Plain-text org files with stable ids (IDEA-042), a lifecycle, and next-step hints (nw next)
Specs that mean something	Short governing specs: acceptance criteria and a test plan, reviewed before build, verified after (nw spec verify, /nw-verify)
An unattended build loop	Queue → implement → your gates → conformance review → rebase, re-gate, merge, with every step in a ledger
Agents in the right places	Headless personas for judgment, plain code for everything else, and a conductor session that handles the alerts
Passive time	Hours per topic and project, with no timer. nw idea clock-in / clock-out adds supplemental wall-time when you want it (Clock)

You meet nightwright as a command-line tool (nw ideas, nw queue watch, nw report), as the interactive ideas desk (nw tui), and as agent skills (/nw-explore, /nw-new-work, /nw-conduct, …).

The loop at workYour ideasThe deskYour time

Find your way

If you want to…	Go to
Set everything up, step by step	Bootstrap from zero
Run the loop day to day: conductor, stewards, queue	Run the agentic loop
Turn a vague idea into a buildable spec	Ideas to specs
Understand how the loop works and why	How it works · Principles
Know what to do when a campaign parks	Operating the loop
Build by hand, without the loop	Idea → ship (by hand)
Hand work to another repo	Outbound
See your hours	Track time
Run a day or a week with nightwright	Daily ops · Weekly ops
Look up a command	Reference