keel ⚓

Keel turns coding agents into work owners. keel is a project-neutral workflow backbone that takes one GitHub issue from intake to a merged pull request, or stops it at a named step with the reason recorded.

How a run happens

1. Your agent host does the work. In Claude Code, Codex, Cursor (partial) or Antigravity you run /keel:ship <issue>; the agent writes the code, opens the pull request and dispatches the reviewers.
2. keel's CLI enforces the backbone. At each of the fixed steps s0–s12 the agent asks keel for the plan, the gates, the reviewers and the evidence it owes. keel ship is a dry assessment: the agent commits, pushes and opens the pull request. The CLI's own writes are these. On GitHub: the merge keel merge makes, the lesson commit keel capture-land pushes onto the pull request's branch (the base branch without --onto), the verdict and closure comments keel post-comment and keel review --live post or update, the labels keel doctor --fix creates, and the branch and pull request per cluster that the experimental keel swarm-run --live pushes and opens, keel swarm-review --live posts verdicts on, and keel swarm-land --live merges each such pull request through keel merge. Locally: keel worktree-remove removes a worktree, keel swarm-status --clean removes what swarm runs left behind, keel swarm-review --live adds and removes a checkout of the head per reviewer seat, keel rollback (or keel canary --auto-revert) commits a revert, and the opt-in revert-check gate has keel run-gates and keel ship add and remove a temp worktree.
3. A pull request merges only through keel merge, which takes the merge lock, re-checks the merge window, reads the live CI rollup and verifies the head-pinned review evidence first.

_{A real recording: scripts/record_demo.py runs this repository's keel in a scratch repository and regenerates it, and tests/test_readme_demo.py fails if it drifts from what keel prints.}

Built for long unattended runs

These map to the long-run advice in Anthropic's Getting the most out of Opus 5.5 guide; they hold for any agent. keel is independent and not affiliated with Anthropic.

Why the merge gets its own checks: a squash merge silently reverted our release, and CI stayed green.

Install

Homebrew (macOS & Linux)

brew tap berkayturanci/keel
brew install keel

Or install in a single command:

brew install berkayturanci/keel/keel

Standalone Curl Installer (macOS, Linux, WSL)

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/berkayturanci/keel/main/scripts/install.sh | sh

PyPI / pipx / uv

pipx install keel-workflow                                    # isolated global CLI tool
uv tool install keel-workflow                                 # the same, with uv
pip install keel-workflow                                     # from PyPI (provides the `keel` command)
pip install "git+https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel@v1.29.0"  # or pin an existing git tag

In a cloud agent session, install it from a SessionStart hook (or add keel to the session's repo scope) so the selected core ref is available before a run.

keel setup (below) writes the workflows into your project for Claude Code and for agents that read .agents/skills/. To install keel into an agent as a plugin instead, see Install into an agent.

Quickstart

In a git repository whose issues live on GitHub:

keel setup --root .                          # add keel config + adapters to this project
keel validate .keel/project.yaml --root .    # validate the config setup just wrote
keel run-gates .keel/project.yaml --root .   # run the build gate once

keel setup detects the stack and writes .keel/project.yaml, the /keel:<command> files under .claude/commands/keel/, and the matching keel-<command> skills under .agents/skills/. With --wizard it also asks who implements and who reviews; on a project that is already set up, --force re-runs it and overwrites .keel/project.yaml.

If setup prints build gate : not configured, it found no stack and no Makefile test rule, so it wrote no build command rather than guess one (#1328); a Makefile with a test rule gets make test. Until you set one, run-gates fails the build gate with no build gate configured: set knobs.build_gate_cmd … and every run blocks on it. Replace knobs: {} in .keel/project.yaml with your project's own test command and run the gates again:

knobs:
  build_gate_cmd: "python3 -m unittest"   # your project's test command

Then ask keel for a dry assessment. It changes nothing:

keel plan  .keel/project.yaml --root .       # the backbone, with this project's gates slotted in
keel ship  .keel/project.yaml --root .       # risk tier, reviewers, merge window, gates, decision
keel doctor .keel/project.yaml --root .      # versions, adapters, gh auth and agent hosts

keel ship — my-project  (base main)
  …
  risk tier     : TIER-2  → 2 reviewer(s)
  …
  jury          : off (default)
  merge window  : OPEN
  …
  gate build          ok
  decision      : MERGE — clear to merge
  note: dry assessment; live merge (s10) needs a configured runner (git + gh auth).

Your first issue. keel's intake needs two sections besides the title: a deliverable (## Deliverable, or Scope, Proposal, Proposed direction, Implementation) and acceptance criteria as a bulleted list (## Acceptance criteria, or Acceptance, Definition of done, Done when, DoD). The objective is an ## Objective, Problem, Summary or Context section when there is one, and the title otherwise. Then open the repository in your agent host and run /keel:ship <issue-number>, or the keel-ship skill on a host that reads skills. What you will see:

1. The agent stops once and asks you to approve the run's consent scopes (filesystem, git, github): keel setup writes consent_mode: "explicit".
2. If the issue has no deliverable or no acceptance criteria, or reads as undecided (TBD, unclear, not sure, …), the agent posts keel's questions and stops before it cuts a branch.
3. Otherwise it works in its own git worktree, opens a pull request, waits on CI and gets reviewed (two reviewers at TIER-2 by default), then runs the gates.
4. The run ends in one of two ways: keel merge merges the pull request and the issue is closed, or the run stops at a named step and says why. A stopped run resumes from its checkpoint.

With no timezone and merge_window set, the merge window is always open; set both to keep merges out of the night. The one-command setup and what to check afterwards are in docs/keel/onboarding.md.

Requirements, cost and limits

Requirements

• Python 3.11 or newer, and git.
• An authenticated gh (gh auth login) for a live run. Every GitHub call the CLI makes goes through gh: keel merge, keel evidence-verify, keel post-comment and the CI rollup all need it.
• Something to implement. An agent host to follow /keel:ship: Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, or Cursor (partial, #1332). The implement and review seats it dispatches can be the host itself, another agent CLI, or a hosted-API delegate (--delegate anthropic-api:MODEL, openai-api:MODEL, google-api:MODEL) that needs only that provider's API key.
• For tier-3 changes: ai-jury, or --no-jury. Without the jury binary the s8 run is a no-op (reported SKIPPED; with no other gate planned it blocks), but a tier-3 merge still requires a jury-verdict unless the run passes --no-jury; it relaxes to advisory only when a posted verdict (or --jury-vendors) reports fewer than 2 vendors. That is the default policy: off a jury-panel tier, team.jury.mode: advisory or --jury-advisory never requires the verdict and team.jury.min_vendors may raise the 2; on a tier whose review is the jury panel, no flag or short panel relaxes it, and only a probe that finds the panel unstaffable turns that tier's jury off, under team.jury.on_unavailable: fallback (the default).

The dry commands in the Quickstart need only Python and git.

Cost

keel adds no model usage beyond the seats a run dispatches, and those are billed by your agent host's plan or by the API provider behind a delegate. Per issue that is the implementer, a gate review when knobs.team.gate names one, one to three reviewers by risk tier (TIER-1 → 1, TIER-2 → 2, TIER-3 → 3, unless knobs.team names the seats), any fix-loop rounds, and at tier 3 the ai-jury panel.

keel cost-report --root . summarises the records under .keel/activity. The only token counts keel records are the ones a hosted-API delegate (anthropic-api, openai-api, google-api, or an OpenAI-compatible profile) reports in its response, and only when the adapter runs it as keel delegate run --activity-run-id <run>. An agent host's own tokens and a CLI delegate's are never recorded. A record with no counts is priced at a placeholder of 1,500 prompt and 400 completion tokens, so read a report built from those as a count of runs, not as a bill. The report says which it is: its Token Basis line reads ESTIMATED at 1,500 prompt / 400 completion tokens per run when no record carries counts, and --json carries token_basis, measured_runs, estimated_runs and assumed_tokens_per_run. The dollar figures are keel's own pricing table applied to those counts, never the provider's bill.

Limits

• GitHub only. Issues, pull requests, CI rollups and merges live on GitHub. The CLI reaches it through gh alone; the mcp transport describes what an agent host's own GitHub MCP server can do for its reads and comments, and marks merges and check rollups as degraded there (transport).
• Swarm is experimental. /keel:swarm plans waves, and swarm-run --live now has each cluster's implementer seat write the change and opens one pull request per cluster, but those pull requests carry no review evidence, and the swarm reviews them only when you run the opt-in swarm-review, which has run once, on a sandbox repository, with single-vendor review seats (the run); swarm-land merges them through keel merge only once their review is recorded (#1400, #1287). One run on a toy repository, reviewed by a single vendor, with run, review and land as separate opt-in commands, is why it stays experimental. Use /keel:ship for work you need merged.
• The unit is the issue. keel has no channel for steering a run in flight: to change direction, change the issue. A run that stops resumes from its checkpoint (keel resume).
• Consent is emit-only in core. keel emits the consent contract and the gate-review seat; the agent host is what honours them (operator consent).

Uninstall

Remove the CLI the way you installed it:

brew uninstall keel                  # Homebrew
pipx uninstall keel-workflow         # pipx
uv tool uninstall keel-workflow      # uv
pip uninstall keel-workflow          # pip

The curl installer uses pipx or uv when it finds them; otherwise it installs into ~/.local/share/keel and links ~/.local/bin/keel, and removing those two paths removes it.

Then remove what keel setup wrote into a project: .keel/, .claude/commands/keel/ and .agents/skills/keel-*/. A plugin comes out with its host's own command: claude plugin uninstall keel@keel, codex plugin remove keel@keel, agy plugin uninstall keel. A Cursor local checkout is the directory ~/.cursor/plugins/local/keel.

Install into an agent

Everything above needs the CLI on your machine — Install puts it there, and keel setup / keel install-adapter write files into a project with it. Installing keel as a plugin is how an agent gets the commands and skills: from this repository's own marketplace, with no install-adapter step. It is not a replacement for the CLI — the command bodies shell out to keel, so it still has to be on your PATH. Jump to the agent you use:

Each badge jumps to that agent's box; open it for the commands. (A browser scrolls to a collapsed <details>; it does not expand one.)

claude plugin marketplace add https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel
claude plugin install keel@keel

claude plugin marketplace update keel
claude plugin update keel@keel

codex plugin marketplace add https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel
codex plugin add keel@keel

codex plugin marketplace upgrade
codex plugin add keel@keel

agy plugin install https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel
agy plugin enable keel

agy plugin install https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel

cursor-agent plugin marketplace add https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/berkayturanci/keel ~/.cursor/plugins/local/keel

git -C ~/.cursor/plugins/local/keel pull                   # if you cloned

cursor-agent plugin marketplace update berkayturanci/keel  # if you used the marketplace

Full detail, including what each route actually registers: docs/keel/install.md.

The plugin ships the same project-neutral command bodies as keel install-adapter; the two flows are additive. The plugin's command files under commands/ are generated from src/keel/adapters/commands/ (the single source of truth) by make plugin / keel install-adapter plugin, and a test fails on any drift. The pip install keel-workflow

• keel install-adapter path is unchanged.

What you get

Each line links to the full description in docs/keel/overview.md or the reference it points at.

• One backbone, four hosts — keel installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor (partial, #1332) and Antigravity (per-host steps).
• A team, not a delegate — knobs.team names who implements, who gives the gate review, who reviews at each risk tier, and who applies the findings (reference).
• A cross-vendor jury, on automatically at tier 3 — a change matching knobs.tier3_globs turns on the ai-jury panel, and the evidence gate then requires its verdict. Below tier 3 it is off unless a run passes --jury or knobs.team makes the panel the review; --no-jury turns it off below a panel tier, and listing jury in gates: also runs it at s8. Without the jury binary the s8 run is a no-op (reported SKIPPED; with no other gate planned it blocks), but a tier-3 merge still requires a jury-verdict unless the run passes --no-jury; it relaxes to advisory only when a posted verdict (or --jury-vendors) reports fewer than 2 vendors. That is the default policy: off a jury-panel tier, team.jury.mode: advisory or --jury-advisory never requires the verdict and team.jury.min_vendors may raise the 2; on a tier whose review is the jury panel, no flag or short panel relaxes it, and only a probe that finds the panel unstaffable turns that tier's jury off, under team.jury.on_unavailable: fallback (the default) (details).
• Safe merges — keel merge claims the lock, re-checks the window, reads the live CI rollup and verifies the evidence before it merges, over GraphQL or REST (reference).
• An auditable evidence chain — review verdicts, test results and model attribution, bound to the commit SHA (guide).
• Test-first and gate-judged loops — knobs.implement_mode: tdd verifies that tests landed first, and knobs.loop iterates s4 until the gates are green (tdd, loop).
• A lesson from every merge — a capture sink writes one Markdown learning per merge and reads matching ones back into later briefs (reference).
• Headless with an API key — hosted-API and OpenAI-compatible delegates, local models, and keel doctor --providers to see what this machine can reach (models).
• Project Lego, policy packs and security presets — add-only hooks, policy_pack data, and bandit / gitleaks / semgrep / trivy presets (extensions).
• Swarm (experimental) — backlog waves in isolated worktrees; a live run implements each cluster and opens one pull request per cluster, which swarm-land merges through keel merge once its review verdicts are posted — the swarm reviews them only when you run the opt-in swarm-review, which has run once, on a sandbox repository, with single-vendor review seats (that run). The live landing before it, on the same sandbox repository, had its reviews done outside the swarm (the run, guide).

How keel compares with coding agents, PR reviewers and merge queues: overview and docs/keel/comparison.md. Why keel exists: From "I opened a PR" to merged.

Three layers

Layer 3  EXTENSIONS   project-owned Lego pieces, ADD-ONLY into named slots
Layer 2  CONFIG       project.yaml — per-project values (branch, build cmd, globs, agents…)
Layer 1  BACKBONE     keel-core — fixed ordered step machine + invariants (this package)

Changing the backbone is a keel-core change. Projects only ever touch layers 2–3. The step-by-step backbone table and its invariants are in docs/keel/overview.md. The original design proposal, docs/proposals/keel-architecture.md, is historical; current behaviour is documented in docs/keel/.

Invocation (/keel:<command>)

The agentic workflows ship with the package as project-neutral adapters and install into the two surfaces agents actually read — so the same /keel:<command> works in every project; only that project's .keel/project.yaml + extensions change the behaviour:

keel install-adapter claude   # native Claude commands → /keel:ship, /keel:regression, …
keel install-adapter skills   # one shared keel-<cmd> skill set under .agents/skills/
#                               (the shared surface for non-Claude hosts)
keel install-adapter all      # both surfaces

17 shipped commands — ship (flagship, with a --compound profile flag), implement, review-cycle, review-all-day, pr-loop, regression, triage, morning, work-block, overnight, swarm, wrap, ci-check, coverage, deps-audit, flake-audit, stale-prs. Each is described in docs/keel/commands.md. The keel CLI does the deterministic work; the adapters are the agentic flows (per-round review, inline comments, delegation).

Companion: keel-visual

keel-visual is an optional, separately installable animated run visualizer (pipx install keel-visual). It renders a keel run from the ledger/checkpoint keel already writes — it never drives one — for any of the 17 command flows, in the terminal (play, dash) or as a web page (render, serve). The core never depends on it. See docs/keel/keel-visual.md and its surfaces.

Inside Claude Code, the optional keel-progress mod shows the same run without a second terminal: a step bar above the prompt and a /keel-progress pane, read from keel status --json. Install it with /plugin install keel-progress@keel; other hosts are unaffected.

Docs

• 🌐 Website + live coverage report — the published site is live at https://keel-ship.dev/ (deployed via the pages.yml workflow). Locally, make site builds the coverage HTML into website/coverage/ and serves it at http://localhost:8000.
• docs/keel/overview.md — why keel exists, the full feature list, the comparison table, the backbone table, dogfooding, and keel-visual
• docs/keel/configuration.md — project.yaml reference
• docs/keel/evidence.md — evidence chain, commit-SHA binding, and compliance auditability
• docs/keel/models.md — supported AI models, providers, and delegate profiles (Claude, OpenAI, Gemini, OpenRouter, DeepSeek, Groq, Ollama, CLI tools)
• docs/keel/parameter-reference.md — exhaustive per-flag reference for every CLI command and the /keel:ship adapter arguments
• docs/keel/install.md — installing keel into an agent (Claude Code, Codex, Antigravity, Cursor (partial)), with the update path for each
• docs/keel/onboarding.md — one-command consumer setup and follow-up checks
• docs/keel/keel-visual.md — the live run board (dash/render/serve, the per-run 2D/3D drawer, --all multi-project, the auto-stamped keel activity channel)
• docs/keel/extensions.md — authoring Lego extensions
• docs/keel/artifacts.md — where runtime state and agent scratch live (the .keel/ dir, its auto-scaffolded .gitignore, and keel scratch-dir)
• docs/keel/consumer-neutrality.md — core vs project policy boundary
• docs/keel/parity-matrix.md — legacy-to-keel command parity status and owning issues
• docs/keel/runtime-capabilities.md — runtime capability detection and requirement declarations
• docs/keel/github-transport.md — GitHub transport selection and normalized operation capabilities
• docs/keel/command-contracts.md — structured JSON plan/result contracts for adapters
• docs/keel/operator-consent.md — live-run operator consent scopes and delegated-agent scope rules
• docs/keel/cli.md — CLI reference
• docs/keel/commands.md — the 17 /keel:<command> workflows (plus the keel status progress command), each with its description
• docs/keel/swarm.md — multi-agent swarm architecture, dependency DAG wave scheduling, isolated worktrees, batch landing (each cluster's pull request merged through keel merge, one at a time), and the 2D/pseudo-3D snapshot visualizer
• docs/keel/cutover.md — staged guide to retire a project's copied command bodies (install → verify → retire), losing nothing
• docs/keel/comparison.md — competitive landscape (Mergify, GitHub merge queue, Qodo/PR-Agent, CodeRabbit, Sweep, OpenHands, Danger, …) + ranked borrow-ideas
• docs/keel/github-actions.md — run keel live on GitHub's free runner (the keel-ship workflow)
• docs/keel/release.md — PyPI/TestPyPI release runbook and package smoke test
• docs/keel/homebrew-release-chain.md — how a release reaches brew install, every guard on the way, and what has already gone wrong
• docs/proposals/keel-architecture.md — the original design proposal (historical; current behaviour is in docs/keel/)
• docs/proposals/api-token-delegate.md — hosted-API (API-token) implementer/reviewer delegate design (#548)

Development

Stdlib-first, pure-core + thin-I/O, deterministic, fully covered (ai-jury ethos).

make test       # offline unit suite (no network, no credentials)
make lint       # ruff
make coverage   # coverage gate (fail_under in pyproject)
make validate   # validate projects/*.yaml and .keel/project.yaml
make site       # build the coverage report + serve the website at localhost:8000

Every module under src/keel/ is held at 100% line + branch coverage: the coverage gate (fail_under = 100, run in CI) measures the whole keel package and omits only the python -m keel entry shim, src/keel/__main__.py. keel drives itself from .keel/project.yaml (dogfooding).

Release maintainers should follow docs/keel/release.md and run python scripts/release_smoke.py before tagging or announcing a package.

Repo layout

src/keel/            the core package (config, model, extensions, findings, gates, orchestrator, cli)
src/keel/schema/     project.schema.json (bundled)
.keel/project.yaml   keel's own dogfood consumer config
projects/*.yaml      example configs and the keel seed copy
src/keel/adapters/   the packaged /keel:<command> bodies (install-adapter: claude commands + shared skills)
keel-visual/         optional companion: animated 2D/3D run visualizer (separate package)
website/             static site + coverage report (make site)
tests/               unit suite
docs/                docs + proposals