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Comment by rc_kas | Hacker News Reader

Can someone explain what this is to my n00b brain. I don't get what claude-cli is missing that this adds in?

IMO the raw Claude CLI is great for one-off interactive sessions, but as soon as you want repeatable multi-step workflows you’re either copy-pasting prompts forever or hacking your own solution manually. That’s exactly the gap these tools fill.

My take on a solution for this is https://ossature.dev — .smd spec markdown files + ossature audit / build that gives you DAG orchestration, SHA-traced increments, and tiny focused contexts.

Isn’t a repeatable, multi-step workflow exactly what a script or Makefile does?

Yeah bash scripts start clean but the sprawl kicks in quick as the workflow and project becomes more complex. Prompts get copied, deps turn manual, and maintenance of your workflow itself becomes the chore.

Ossature swaps that for structured SMDs and optional AMDs. Multiple specs build a clean DAG that drops into an editable plan.toml so everything stays traceable without the mess.

Feel free to check the example projects on https://github.com/ossature/ossature-examples

> Yeah bash scripts start clean but the sprawl kicks in quick as the workflow and project becomes more complex.

Then just use Python.

That’s what Ossature is :)

I use bash scripts. Both Claude and Vibe support all kinds of arguments if you need a prompt to “become a task”. Bash is also deterministic and easy to read and debug.

can you elaborate on "easy to read and debug", because in my experience it is anything but

Compared to a random tool someone vibecoded?

what about a random bash script that somebody vibe coded

Had a quick look. Stumbled upon the markdown format smd.

Was wondering if using front-matter instead of a "custom" encoding for parseble data was considered?

Yeah, I did briefly consider front-matter, but ended up with inline @ tags because I thought it kept the entire document feeling like one coherent spec instead of header-data + body, front matter felt like config to me, but this is 0.0.1 so things might change :)

As a prerequisite you’d want to understand the purpose of Ralph Wiggum Loops

But in general this is meta to the CLI agent.

So if you were to use the CLI to perform a review of some code. This tool would allow you to loop the output of the code review 5 times onto itself.

> So if you were to use the CLI to perform a review of some code. This tool would allow you to loop the output of the code review 5 times onto itself.

Claude already does that if you ask nicely.

To a certain extent, yes it does! For my cases, I'm often running 3 parallel implementations that get 10 to 20 iterations deep, and then Claude has to sort out the pros and cons of the options and also take the best bits of each. Easy to hit the context window with Claude just running those on its own, so giving `/cook` to Claude, it can offload a bit more via cook and stay higher level.

This is for co-ordinating instances of Claude or Codex, not something you do inside each instance.

Claude and Codex can also use the cook command to coordinate runs of other agents. This is similar to how you can describe a workflow to them of how to use subagents, and they'll try, but this gives them a reliable deterministic way to run those agents. An added benefit of having Claude/Codex/etc. use cook directly is that they are really good at analyzing the traces of what is happening inside of cook and after the fact.

Maybe not adds in, but wraps around. You could accomplish much of this with fairly simply bash scripts.

You could accomplish all of it with claude -p (headless mode).

Indeed.

Where are people finding time for these sort of projects.

They bootstrap a workflow with a prompt then build an orchestrator off that then prompt it to be converted to an opencode plugin and then prompt a website to be generated advertising it and then prompt a tool that reviews hacker news feedback and automatically incorporates feedback into next generation of the tool. At the end of the week they go to their manager and complain they are out of tokens for the actual job they are being paid for.

Haha, not far off. Only difference is I'm not spending my tokens at work. I use this on a side project video game that I'm developing.

Admittedly I might be missing a flag or two with claude, but how are multiple loops and comparisons of solutions done with just headless mode?

Via skills.

It's just a prompt.

You have building blocks like "--resume <sessionId>" and "--fork-session".

For example, one thing you can do is curate the context of an "immutable" conversation and then reuse it as a base context for other prompts.

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