Ship: AI-Powered Software Development Harness

An agentic development harness for Claude Code, Codex & Cursor: gated pipeline from spec to green checks.

Ship orchestrates end-to-end software development — planning, implementation, E2E tests, review, QA, simplify, and PR creation — with quality gates at every transition.

How It Works

Ship is a harness, not a copilot. It doesn't help AI write code — it constrains AI to produce reliable results through mechanically enforced quality gates.

The problem Ship solves: AI coding agents are capable but unreliable. They skip tests, hallucinate about code they haven't read, review their own work and call it good, and declare victory without evidence. Ship makes these failure modes structurally impossible.

• Every phase is an isolated subagent. The reviewer has never seen the implementation context. The QA evaluator can only see the spec, the diff, and the running application. Fresh context per phase means no accumulated bias.
• Plans are adversarially tested. An independent peer challenger produces code-grounded objections with file paths and snippets. The planner must respond with evidence, not hand-waving. Two rounds before you see anything.
• Evidence is hierarchical. L1 (screenshot, curl response, console log) is the only acceptable proof. L2 (HTTP 200, "tests passed") is insufficient. L3 ("should work based on the code") is an automatic FAIL.
• State lives on disk, not in memory. The current phase is tracked in a local state file. On resume, the orchestrator reads it and picks up where it left off. A stop-gate hook blocks session exit while the pipeline is active.
• The finish line is checks green, not PR created. After opening the PR, Ship enters a fix loop — read CI failures, dispatch fixes, address review comments, resolve merge conflicts — up to 3 rounds before escalating.
• Test-driven implementation. Stories follow a RED-GREEN-REFACTOR cycle with per-story code review before merge.

Installation

Claude Code

/plugin marketplace add heliohq/ship
/plugin install ship@heliohq

Codex

Fetch and follow instructions from https://raw.githubusercontent.com/heliohq/ship/refs/heads/main/.codex/INSTALL.md

Codex uses hooks instead of plugins. See .codex/INSTALL.md for setup.

Cursor

/add-plugin ship

Or search for Ship in the Cursor plugin marketplace.

Verify Installation

Open a fresh session and give it a task — for example, "plan out a user authentication system". Ship should kick in automatically.

Updating

/plugin update ship

Skills

Run /ship:auto and Ship handles the full pipeline. Or run individual phases when you only need one:

Skill	Description
/ship:auto	Full pipeline: design → dev → E2E → review → QA → simplify → handoff
/ship:setup	Bootstrap repo infrastructure, generate AGENTS.md and safety rules
/ship:design	Adversarial spec + plan with peer challenge rounds
/ship:dev	Host implements, peer (Codex) cross-validates; parallel waves for file-independent stories
/ship:e2e	Codify the change's acceptance criteria as persistent E2E tests, detect or scaffold the framework, run them against the real app
/ship:review	Bug-focused diff review — no style nits
/ship:qa	Exploratory sweep against the running app, finds what codified tests missed
/ship:handoff	PR creation + CI fix loop until checks green
/ship:refactor	Four-lens scan, classify by risk, apply with verification
/ship:learn	Capture session mistakes into persistent learnings
/ship:arch-design	System design thinking — requirements, components, trade-offs, scaling
/ship:write-docs	Project documentation with frontmatter, lifecycle, and indexing
/ship:visual-design	DESIGN.md visual system for consistent UI generation

Skills trigger automatically based on what you're doing. Session start injects a short Ship routing policy that reminds the agent to invoke the matching /ship:* skill before proceeding and to default to /ship:auto for end-to-end feature work.

See docs/skills.md for detailed guides.

License

MIT

Acknowledgments

Ship is built on ideas from:

• agent-browser — Browser automation CLI for AI agents
• Superpowers — Jesse Vincent's agentic skills framework for Claude Code
• gstack — Garry Tan's opinionated Claude Code setup
• awesome-design-md — The 9-section DESIGN.md format used by /ship:visual-design
• Codex — The .learnings concept that inspired /ship:learn's staged learning lifecycle
• Claude Code /simplify — The built-in skill that inspired /ship:refactor's four-lens scan