Pulse

A gated delivery workflow for Claude Code and Codex

Stop agents from hallucinating requirements, skipping verification, and producing unauditable work.

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What is Pulse?

Pulse wraps AI agents in a gated delivery chain. Every decision is locked before planning starts. Every plan is approved before code is written. Every bead of work is verified before it's closed. Every feature is reviewed before it merges.

Without this structure, agents skip steps. With it, they can't.

Pulse ships as a skills package. Each skill is a SKILL.md file loaded into context at invocation. The workflow contract lives in those skill files, while repo-local Node helpers handle onboarding, state sync, dependency checks, and local coordination. There is no separate orchestration service to deploy. Pulse is a docs-first skill plugin that uses the tools you already have.

The Delivery Chain

Pulse turns a vague request into a reviewed delivery trail:

1. pulse:exploring locks decisions into CONTEXT.md
2. pulse:planning selects work shape (work-shape.md, phase-plan.md, or epic-map.md) and prepares current work artifacts
3. pulse:validating verifies feasibility and readiness for the selected current work
4. pulse:swarming or pulse:executing implements the approved current work
5. pulse:reviewing blocks weak merges
6. pulse:compounding captures durable learnings for future work

The 4 Human Gates

Gate	What it blocks
Gate 1	Planning before decisions are locked
Gate 2	Work-shape execution prep before the selected shape artifact is approved
Gate 3	Execution before feasibility-validated current work is explicitly approved
Gate 4	Merge before review is complete

Why use pulse

Problem	Pulse response
Requirements drift inside chat	Lock decisions in CONTEXT.md
Plans look plausible but are brittle	Validate before execution starts
Parallel agents step on each other	Coordinate through beads, bv, and reservations
Work is hard to audit later	Keep artifacts, evidence, and review trail in the repo

Lineage

Pulse is downstream of everal strong agentic-development systems and distills the parts that fit this repo owner's actual workflow:

• Khuym, which provides most of the validate-first chain and Flywheel-style bead workflow
• Superpowers, which contributes the strongest behavioral discipline around brainstorming, verification, debugging, and skill design
• Flywheel contributes the operational backbone: beads, bv, swarm execution, and the habit of turning plans into live work graphs instead of loose TODO lists.
• Compound Engineering contributes parallel review, severity-based findings, and the compound-learning loop that feeds future work.
• GSD contributes the philosophy: discuss first, research second, plan third, and do not execute until the plan has been verified.

Installation

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add quanpersie2001/pulse
/plugin install pulse@pulse

Codex

codex plugin marketplace add quanpersie2001/pulse

Codex reads the marketplace name from .agents/plugins/marketplace.json, so the installed plugin key is pulse@pulse-dev. In the desktop app, enable or install pulse from the pulse-dev marketplace if it is not already active after the marketplace add step.

If you previously added an older Pulse marketplace named pulse, remove it before reinstalling:

codex plugin marketplace remove pulse

After Install

Installing the plugin makes the packaged skills, hooks, and MCP metadata available to the runtime. To use Pulse inside a target repository, start with pulse:preflight so Pulse can verify or install the repo-local onboarding assets it needs under .pulse/.

Project Docs

Read this when you want...	Link
The architecture and runtime model	docs/ARCHITECTURE.md
A concrete walkthrough	docs/examples/golden-path.md
The evaluation workflow	docs/evaluation/pulse-plugin-eval.md

Maintainer Notes

When public docs or skill metadata change:

bash scripts/check-markdown-links.sh
bash scripts/sync-skills.sh --dry-run

Run evaluations through the canonical entrypoint:

node scripts/pulse-plugin-eval.mjs run

More evaluation material:

• docs/evaluation/pulse-plugin-eval.md
• docs/evaluation/pulse-swarming-hardening.md
• docs/evaluation/how-to-read-results.md

Contributing

See CONTRIBUTING.md for skill structure, versioning, and PR process.

MIT License