metalworks

Go from a startup idea to launch, grounded in real demand.

Give metalworks one sentence about what you want to build. It reads real conversations across the web — Reddit, Hacker News, forums, Q&A, or your own data — to tell you whether people actually want it, then turns that into the things you need to launch: your positioning, the competitors to beat, a design system, a build plan for your coding agent, and launch copy. Every claim links back to a real quote you can click — nothing is invented.

A Python library (also a CLI, an MCP server, and a Claude Code plugin). MIT licensed and built to be embedded — every layer (LLM, search, embeddings, storage, data source) is a swappable protocol.

Status: pre-release (0.4.0). APIs are unstable below 1.0. The stable surface is the Metalworks facade, the metalworks.contract Pydantic models, and the MCP tool contracts — everything else may change in any 0.x release. Everything described in this README runs today.

Read the USAGE_POLICY before you use the Reddit side. Short version: authentic, disclosed engagement only. No fake personas, no vote manipulation, no coordinated inauthentic behavior.

Quickstart

Install metalworks with a provider SDK and set one key — any provider works:

pip install "metalworks[openai,research]"   # or [google,research], [anthropic,research]
export OPENAI_API_KEY=...                    # or ANTHROPIC_API_KEY / GOOGLE_API_KEY / OPENROUTER_API_KEY

Or run keyless on your Claude Code login — no provider key at all:

pip install "metalworks[claude-code,research]"   # bundles the `claude` CLI; no env var to set

With [claude-code] installed and no key configured, the chat model and web search fall back to your Claude Code session (the keyless "floor"). It's the no-setup path for local/individual use — it spawns the claude CLI per call (~5–7s each), so a configured key is faster for big runs, and any explicit key/ref still wins.

Embeddings need no separate key either: with a Google or OpenAI key metalworks uses theirs, otherwise it falls back to a small local model (fastembed, bundled with [research], downloaded once). So one chat key — Anthropic, OpenRouter, anything — or zero keys via Claude Code — gets you a full run. metalworks models warm pre-downloads the local model.

Prefer Vertex AI over an API key? Set GOOGLE_GENAI_USE_VERTEXAI=true plus VERTEX_PROJECT_ID and VERTEX_LOCATION and the Google adapters authenticate via Application Default Credentials. See docs/configuration.md.

from metalworks import Metalworks

mw = Metalworks()             # provider inferred; or Metalworks(model="anthropic/claude-opus-4-8")
research = mw.research("Is there demand for a focus supplement aimed at developers?",
                       subreddits=["Nootropics", "Supplements"])
report = research.demand

Every quote in report.ranked_clusters is the exact text of a real Reddit comment, and every web finding carries its real source URL — never model prose. Anything metalworks can't back with a real quote, it drops. See why you can trust the output.

The Metalworks facade is the easy path over run_research / run_discovery and the protocols — drop down to those whenever you want more control. Submissions and comments both come from the live Arctic Shift API by default — current data, keyless, on core httpx. Opt into a bulk/offline tier with ARCTIC_SHIFT_SOURCE: hf reads the Hugging Face open-index/arctic Parquet mirror (metalworks[arctic], reads HF_TOKEN to lift the public rate limit), mirror reads a Supabase Storage bucket (metalworks[supabase]). Or bring your own corpus to skip Arctic Shift entirely.

Extras

Core stays lean (pydantic, httpx, typer, rich). Everything that pulls a provider SDK or a heavy dependency lives behind an extra, so you install only what matches the keys you have. Adapters lazy-import their SDK and raise MissingExtraError with the exact pip install command when it is absent.

pip install "metalworks[google]"
pip install "metalworks[research,reddit]"
pip install "metalworks[all]"

A bare import metalworks pulls in no provider modules; CI asserts this.

Architecture

metalworks owns small, versioned protocols and ships thin adapters over official provider SDKs. It does not route every provider through LiteLLM by default. The protocols are the seam your code and the pipeline speak through:

• ChatModel — complete_text / complete_structured, model bound at adapter construction. GroundedChatModel adds model-native web grounding with full provenance (chunks plus character-offset supports).
• SearchProvider — external web search (Exa, Tavily, Parallel, Firecrawl), or keyless via Claude Code.
• EmbeddingProvider — embeddings with a hard index-identity guard.
• The typed repos (CorpusRepo, BriefRepo, RunRepo, AccountRepo, OpportunityRepo, InboxRepo) are the storage protocol. MemoryStores and SqliteStores ship in core; hosted backends (Postgres/PostgREST) are a custom store you implement downstream — see docs/custom-store.md.

See docs/protocols.md for signatures.

Two verticals sit on top of those protocols:

• Research (metalworks.research) — turns an idea into a clustered DemandReport of real, permalinked Reddit quotes. Entry point: run_research(deps, brief=...). Several functions build on a finished report, each linking its output back to that report's real quotes: positioning (build_positioning_brief), the landscape (run_landscape), distribution (build_channel_strategy / build_channel_assets / build_data_asset / build_geo_plan / plan_distribution), and a build plan + scaffold (build_spec_from_report / scaffold) — which also picks the surface and sketches feature-grounded screens.
• Reddit (metalworks.reddit) — OAuth, search, subreddit intel, inbox, posting, in-library rate limiting, and a deterministic compliance gate (heuristic_check) that runs offline on reply and post text.

Four form factors share that contract:

1. Library — from metalworks import Metalworks, or the functions and protocols underneath.
2. CLI — metalworks research|reddit|arctic|discovery run, the report commands (metalworks research position|landscape, metalworks distribution strategy|assets|data-report|geo|requirements|plan|measure|engage, metalworks build init), metalworks doctor, metalworks mcp serve.
3. MCP server — zero-key data tools plus key-gated pipeline tools, over stdio or SSE.
4. Claude Code plugin — /demand-report and friends (/plugin marketplace add Lab2A/metalworks).

Testing your own adapters and backends

The conformance suites metalworks holds itself to ship as a public module:

from metalworks.testing import FakeChatModel, FakeEmbedding, check_all_repos

def test_my_backend():
    check_all_repos(MyBackend())   # includes the >1000-row pagination case

See docs/custom-chatmodel.md and docs/custom-store.md.

Docs

Full docs: metalworks.lab2a.ai

• Installation · Quickstart · Build a startup, end to end
• Capabilities: demand research · positioning & competitors · design system · build spec · distribution · GEO / LLM-citability · Reddit engagement
• Why you can trust the output · Data model
• Reference: Python SDK · CLI · MCP tools · Configuration · Using with AI agents
• Extending: overview · protocols · custom model/corpus/store

Contributing & development

Collaborators welcome. metalworks is contract-first: one set of Pydantic models (metalworks.contract) is the stable spine, and every surface speaks it — so a capability lands on the Python facade, the CLI, the MCP server, and the Claude Code plugin together, never just one. The architecture page is the mental model; CONTRIBUTING.md is the operational guide.

git clone https://github.com/Lab2A/metalworks && cd metalworks
uv venv && uv pip install -e ".[all,dev]"
# the gate — everything must pass before a PR:
uv run ruff check . && uv run ruff format --check . && uv run pyright && uv run pytest -q

Where things live:

The golden rule: a change to a primitive moves all four surfaces, the contract registry (gen_ts_types + contract/__init__), and the docs — together. Run /pr-ready (the Claude Code skill in .claude/skills/) before opening a PR: it runs the gate, the contract-drift check CI doesn't, and walks the parity / docs / CHANGELOG checklist.

Project

• License: MIT.
• Usage policy: USAGE_POLICY.md.
• Security: SECURITY.md.
• Contributing: CONTRIBUTING.md.
• Changes: CHANGELOG.md.
• Org: Lab2A.