vibey

Read it first: the design is a research paper — PDF · HTML — and the whole documentation is a book — PDF · EPUB · print.

You've used an AI coding agent. Then you babysat it — re-prompting when it lost the thread, re-explaining everything after a crash, copying results between tools, watching a run die at 2am because one vendor's credits ran out. The agent was autonomous; the delivery was you.

Vibey is the layer that does the babysitting. It's an orchestrator that wraps AI coding agents so you're not managing sessions or threads by hand: you describe what you want, it interviews you until the spec is sharp, builds unattended across a pool of engines, brings you back only for the decisions that are genuinely yours, and survives crashes and credit exhaustion without losing a single open question.

Never written code? You can still read this. Code is text files of instructions computers run; an AI coding agent is a program that writes and edits that code from plain-English requests; deploying means putting the finished software somewhere people can use it. Vibey's job is to manage a team of those agents from your first description to deployed software, the way a project manager runs a team — asking you questions up front, checking the work, and only interrupting you when a decision is truly yours.

The project and its engine are vibey; every app and interface a person uses is krypton (sub-doctrine 9.e), whose emblem is the krypton atom: krypton-84, four shells.

For the precise version: a queue-based, six-phase conductor for autonomous software delivery — with an optional visual-design interstitial and opt-in Azure deployment — built on top of the *loop autonomous session runners, which live in this repository as uv workspace members (ADR-0021).

What problem this solves

An autonomous coding session is not autonomous software delivery. A single claudeloop run can finish a task, but it cannot interview you until the spec is sharp, split the work into parallel items, verify each one against gates it cannot game, survive its own credit exhaustion by handing off to a different vendor's engine without losing a single open question, or know that a review finding should reopen design rather than vanish into a transcript.

Vibey conducts all of that. You describe what you want; it interviews you until the spec is sharp, builds unattended across a pool of engines with real budget caps, reviews the result with you, and (only if you opt in) deploys. Every choice, finding, and handoff lives in an append-only PostgreSQL ledger — never in one vendor's chat session.

Install

Requires Python 3.12+ and PostgreSQL 14+. Windows is not a supported target. Vibey supports every currently supported PostgreSQL major (14–18), and CI runs the database suite against each one. Every database-backed command reads the connection string from VIBEY_PG_URL; vibey never guesses a database and exits with VIBEY_PG_URL is not set when it is missing.

One install is the whole family: vibey, all five *loop engines, and the tools (vibey-gh, vibey-skills, vibey-bootstrap) ship in the one vibey distribution and land on PATH together (ADR-0037). What each engine still needs separately is its own vendor CLI and credentials — which is what vibey doctor checks.

uv tool install vibey-engine          # or: pipx install vibey-engine / pip install vibey-engine
vibey install --postgres       # install/start local PostgreSQL 18 when needed, then set
                               # the scram-sha-256 pg_hba.conf lines in SECURITY.md §7
export VIBEY_PG_URL=postgresql://vibey_app:change-me@localhost:5432/vibey # the application
# The owner's DSN is given to `vibey migrate` alone, for that one command -- never exported,
# so no worker, engine session or gate command ever holds it:
VIBEY_PG_MIGRATE_URL=postgresql://user@localhost:5432/vibey vibey migrate
vibey doctor                   # pre-flight: engines, and whether the ledger is guarded

Two DSNs, because the ledger is append-only by the database (ADR-0055): the application connects as a role that can read and append to the ledger and nothing more. One DSN still works, but vibey doctor fails its ledger-guard check until the roles are split (database roles).

vibey install --postgres uses Homebrew, apt, or dnf to install and start the current stable PostgreSQL major. vibey doctor reports local PostgreSQL readiness as well as engine health; vibey doctor --install-postgres performs the same explicit installation before checking. --record also writes engine results to the database for a project, and --cluster runs the in-cluster preflight (DSN, workspace, secrets, database, migrations) instead.

gptossloop and qwenloop install with everything else; what is opt-in is the feature, not the install. Each local engine has a switch: gptossloop — the sovereign default on GPT-OSS 20B — is on unless VIBEY_FEATURE_GPTOSSLOOP=0; qwenloop — the same runner on qwen3:14b — needs VIBEY_FEATURE_QWENLOOP=1; and claudeloop-local (claudeloop on a local backend profile) needs VIBEY_FEATURE_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL=1 (ADR-0064). A switched-on local engine is preferred first for BUILD — a paid engine runs only when no local one is eligible — and vibey doctor lists it; vibey doctor also honours [features] gptossloop = false / qwenloop = true / claudeloop_local = true in a ./vibey.toml. With no --provider, vibey work and vibey worker run DESIGN and DECOMPOSE on the sovereign gptossloop providers too (ADR-0038). VIBEY_OLLAMA_URL is the one endpoint setting; the local models guide has the Ollama recipe.

To add deterministic, budgeted context packets from the vibey-skills marketplace, enable it per project — vibey-skills ships in the same distribution, so there is nothing extra to install:

vibey new my-app --repo ~/src/my-app \
  --skills-context-mode shadow --skills-context-budget 6000

shadow builds and records packet provenance without changing agent prompts. After observing results, switch the project config to inject to append successful packets to BUILD prompts. Missing tools, timeouts, low-confidence retrieval, and insufficient budgets all fall back to the original prompt. The feature is off by default, and wind-down prompts are never modified (ADR-0031).

The same tree is a Claude Code plugin marketplace — every plugin in the family, the 135 skills plugins and vibey-gh's four, from one address and nothing else:

/plugin marketplace add the-vibey-project/vibey
/plugin install security-principles@vibey
/plugin                                    # browse all 139

The root manifest is rendered from the workspace members by vibey-gh marketplace and held to them by vibey-gh check (ADR-0034); it is never edited by hand. Since the family ships as one distribution (ADR-0037) this root manifest is the only marketplace there is.

Quickstart

export VIBEY_PG_URL=postgresql://user@localhost:5432/vibey
vibey new my-app --repo ~/src/my-app \
  --max-cycle-dollars 15                     # real budget brake, enforced from the ledger
vibey doctor --conformance --record          # verify each engine's contract, persist health for the latest project
vibey worker --provider claudeloop \
  --engines claudeloop,agyloop -j 2          # live DESIGN provider; unattended build across the pool

# When vibey parks for your input (design gates, review, budget grants):
vibey gates                                  # each open gate, its prompt, and the command that answers it
vibey answer <gate-id> --defaults            # accept the interview defaults, or:
vibey answer <gate-id> --raw '{"max_dollars": 25}'   # raise a tripped budget cap
vibey design accept <project-id> --no-visual
vibey answer <gate-id> --verdict accept      # review demo
vibey answer <gate-id> --choice local_only   # decline deployment → DONE (local)

vibey doctor --record needs a project to record against, so run it after vibey new. vibey worker defaults to --provider gptossloop, the sovereign DESIGN interview and BUILD decomposition on a local model; pass --provider claudeloop for the same on a paid engine, or --provider scripted for the test double. --provider qwenloop is still accepted and read as gptossloop (ADR-0064). vibey gates lists every open gate with its id, its prompt, and the exact vibey answer command that answers it (vibey gates <project-id> for one project); vibey projects lists your projects, their ids, and how many gates each is waiting on. Both take --json.

The greeter live-demo runbook walks a full paid run end to end, including the zero-touch contracts.

Command reference

Every command's flags and defaults are in the CLI reference. The most common ones:

Configuration

vibey.toml's schema — [project], [isolation], [budget], [engines] (with [engines.claudeloop_local]), [phases.design/build/review], [provision], [deploy], [notifications], [telemetry], [features], [qwenloop], [queue.priority], [queue.reap], and the operational surfaces [tracker], [docs], [secrets], [files], [email], [sms], [messaging], [config_store], [cache], [bus], [blob] and [siem] — is implemented and unit-tested in domain/config.py (parse_config) and infrastructure/config_loader.py. [verify], [gates], [engine_environment], [failover], [hub] and [sabbath] are read by their own loaders. Defaults and an example file are in the configuration reference. The local-engine keys are read at runtime today: [features] gptossloop, [features] qwenloop, [features] claudeloop_local and [engines.claudeloop_local]. vibey doctor and vibey loops read them from ./vibey.toml in the current directory, and the worker reads the same keys from the project's stored config (which no CLI flag sets yet); VIBEY_FEATURE_GPTOSSLOOP, VIBEY_FEATURE_QWENLOOP, VIBEY_FEATURE_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL and VIBEY_CLAUDELOOP_LOCAL_PROFILE override them. [notifications], [telemetry], [gates] and [engine_environment] are copied from the repository's vibey.toml into the stored project config by vibey new; the worker and lifecycle repository then use those settings. Telemetry is an in-process recorder for now, so it is available to the running app but has no external exporter yet.

What does configure a project today is a handful of vibey new CLI flags (--max-cycles, --max-cycle-dollars, --max-cycle-turns, --skills-context-mode, --skills-context-budget) recorded directly into that project's stored config at creation time — see the CLI reference. The two caps can be changed after that: vibey budget set and vibey budget clear rewrite them in the stored config, record each change on the ledger, and bind the next BUILD session of a worker already running.

Notifications

infrastructure/notify/ implements a NotificationService that dispatches desktop alerts and HMAC-SHA256-signed webhooks (X-Vibey-Signature, see SECURITY.md), and it is covered by tests. build_app() constructs it; workers notify on newly raised gates, and project transitions notify on phase changes and completion. Enable it in the repository TOML with [notifications] enabled = true; vibey new stores that table with the project.

Telemetry

infrastructure/otel.py implements TelemetryTracer (span tracing for jobs, turns, and handoffs) and TelemetryMetrics (engine-selection, queue-latency, phase-duration, handoff-failure, and cost-spend counters), plus calculate_rotation_fairness() for measuring rotation fairness against declared engine weights. It is covered by unit tests and constructed by build_app(). The worker records queue latency, phase duration, and job spans; BUILD records engine turns, selections, handoffs, and cost spend. Set [telemetry] enabled = false to disable those runtime calls for a project.

The shape of it

  DELIVERY STAGE SET
  INTAKE → ① DESIGN ──┬─ no ───────────────→ ② BUILD ⇄ ③ REVIEW
             ▲        │                       autonomous / interactive
             │        └─ yes → [VISUAL DESIGN]
             │                  interactive, media generation + confirmation
             │                            │ visual-ready
             │                            └──────────────→ ② BUILD
             │
             └─ loop-back from ② BUILD or ③ REVIEW: a finding needs clarification

  ③ REVIEW ── no deployment ─────────────────────────────→ DONE (local)
       │ opt in
       ▼
  DEPLOYMENT STAGE SET
  ④ DEPLOY DESIGN → ⑤ DEPLOY EXECUTE → ⑥ DEPLOY REVIEW → DONE (deployed)
       interactive       autonomous          interactive
             ▲                 ▲                    │
             └─────────────────┴────────────────────┘
                  ⑥ can also route a defect back to ①, ②, or ③

The six phases — ① Design · ② Build · ③ Review · ④ Deploy Design · ⑤ Deploy Execute · ⑥ Deploy Review. The circled numbers above are these; bold below means the phase talks to you.

① Design → ② Build → ③ Review → ④ Deploy Design → ⑤ Deploy Execute → ⑥ Deploy Review

Phases 1, 3, 4, and 6 talk to you. The optional Visual Design stage also talks to you and cannot hand work to BUILD until every planned visual is accepted or you explicitly waive the stage. Phases 2 and 5 run unattended, survive rate-limit windows and credit exhaustion, and rotate eligible engines/providers when one runs dry. Phase 3 asks whether to deploy; "no" is a successful local completion. Phase 6 accepts a successful deployment, requests changed deployment details in Phase 4, retries an unambiguous deployment in Phase 5, or routes an application defect back to the appropriate delivery phase.

Why it isn't just another agent framework

The hard part is not calling an LLM in a loop — claudeloop and its siblings already solve that, including the distinction between a waitable rate-limit window and exhausted credits that no amount of waiting will fix. Vibey adds the things those runners deliberately do not do:

1. A phase machine with loop-backs, so a review finding becomes a new design conversation rather than a lost note.
2. Round-robin engine rotation with lossless handoff — the conversation is an append-only event ledger, not a chat transcript locked inside one vendor's session, so any engine can pick up where any other left off. A handoff that would lose an open question, decision, assumption, or finding is rejected by a pure, deterministic no-loss gate — never silently accepted.
3. A durable queue, so work survives a laptop lid closing, a crash, or a provider outage, and so multiple work items build in parallel in isolated git worktrees.
4. Real money brakes — per-cycle dollar and turn caps summed from the ledger's own cost events, with parks that tell you the exact command to grant more.

Documentation

Status

Live-validated. The full pipeline has conducted real paid deliveries end to end: multi-worker builds (-j 2) with cross-engine rotation (claudeloop implements, agyloop verifies), the bounded verify-repair ladder, budget caps tripping and being granted live, and fully zero-touch DESIGN phases answered with nothing but --defaults. The validation campaign's findings — a blind budget brake, a repair-loop livelock, terminal gate-command failures — were each fixed and re-validated live.

Every architectural layer (domain, application, infrastructure, cli) holds a 100% branch-coverage floor, enforced as four separate CI gates (ADR-0023); the absorbed runner and tool packages keep their own gates (ADR-0022). domain/ is pure stdlib, enforced by import-linter and an AST-walking purity test — the no-loss handoff gate is deterministic code, not a model's opinion.

Troubleshooting

Upgrading

From 1.0.0 vibey follows semantic versioning: a change that breaks vibey.toml fields, ledger event shapes, or CLI flags takes a major version. Before upgrading:

1. Read CHANGELOG.md for the versions between your current version and the target.
2. Re-run vibey doctor --conformance --record afterward — engine contracts and conformance checks can gain new checks between releases.
3. The database schema migrates automatically (infrastructure/db/migrator.py); no manual migration step is needed.

Every push to develop publishes a uniquely versioned dev build (X.Y.Z.devN) to TestPyPI; every push to main publishes to PyPI. Two packages publish, each by its own workflow (ADR-0069): vibey-engine, the engine family (vibey-engine.yml), and krypton-app, the apps and the krypton command (krypton-app.yml). After a successful main release, github-release.yml tags that exact commit and creates the matching GitHub Release. Versioning and release are owned by the in-tree vibey-gh; release-please is retired (ADR-0028). uv tool install vibey-engine (or pipx install vibey-engine / pip install vibey-engine) tracks stable releases of the engine family (ADR-0037, ADR-0069); pip install krypton-app adds the apps.

Formal notes

For the reader who wants the theory under the phases. Work items form a queue $Q$ in PostgreSQL; workers claim with SELECT ... FOR UPDATE SKIP LOCKED, so claims serialize per item without global locks: for any item $w$, at most one worker holds $w$ at any instant, while throughput scales with $\min(|Q|, \text{workers})$. The conductor is a six-phase state machine $\Sigma = \langle D, B, R, D_d, D_e, D_r \rangle$ (design, build, review, deploy-design, deploy-execute, deploy-review) with human gates exactly at ${D, R, D_d, D_r}$ — interactive phases are the fixed points where the ledger's open questions must drain to zero before the transition fires. Crash recovery follows from two invariants: every decision, finding, and handoff is a row in an append-only ledger before it takes effect (write-ahead intent), and engine handoff re-derives session context from the ledger alone — so vendor credit exhaustion is a scheduling event, not a loss of state: $\text{state}(t) = f(\text{ledger}_{\leq t})$, independent of any vendor session. The full treatment — with the queue-fairness argument and the gate-soundness proof sketch — is the research paper, Ledger-Mediated Orchestration: Vendor-Independent Autonomous Software Delivery over a Pool of Coding Agents: read it online or download the PDF (source: docs/paper.md). The complete documentation is also a book: PDF · EPUB · print HTML.

Project links

Join the community

vibey is free and open-source software, and it is built in the open. If you write software and want to build the autonomous-delivery stack with us, come and say hello on Discord, and read how to join me. Questions, critiques, pull requests and wild ideas are all welcome.

Related projects

These packages live in this repository as uv workspace members (src/vibey_runners/*, src/vibey_tools/*; ADR-0021). Each keeps its own pyproject.toml, version, Python floor, tests and gates — but none is published separately any more: all nine ship inside the one vibey distribution (ADR-0037), and their former standalone GitHub repositories and PyPI projects no longer exist.

License

MIT © Adam Matthew Steinberger

The short version, again: agents can code, but delivery still meant babysitting them — Vibey is the layer that does the babysitting, from sharp spec to deployed software, without losing a single open question.

Your next step: install it and let it interview you —

uv tool install vibey-engine && vibey doctor

Prefer to read first? The design is a research paper (PDF), and the whole documentation is a book (EPUB).