compound-workflows
Fork of Every's compound-engineering for Claude Code. Longer sessions without context exhaustion, session recovery when things go wrong, task tracking that survives compaction, multi-model red team (PAL + Claude), fewer plan iterations, and memory that persists across sessions.
- What is Compound Engineering?
- Why Fork?
- What's Different
- Install
- Update
- Commands
- Dependencies
- Key Concept: Disk-Persisted Agents
- Roadmap
- Attribution
What is Compound Engineering?
Compound engineering is a methodology where each unit of engineering work makes subsequent units easier. You document solutions, capture decisions with their rationale, and build institutional knowledge that compounds over time.
Compound workflows generalize this idea beyond software engineering to all knowledge work — an opinionated way to use Claude Code for research, planning, decision-making, and implementation. The cycle remains the same: brainstorm → plan → work → review → compound.
The plugin captures best-practice patterns and makes them shareable, while remaining configurable to individual user preferences.
Why Fork?
Ambitious tasks in Claude Code hit walls:
- Context exhaustion — Agent outputs fill up context and trigger compaction. → Agents write to disk and return summaries, so sessions last longer.
- State loss — Work progress disappears on compaction.
→
/compact-prepand/recoverhandle planned and unplanned session boundaries; beads tracking survives across compactions. - Plan iteration overhead — Plans require many rounds to reach quality. → Readiness checks and consolidation catch issues earlier, preventing the fix-introduces-new-bug cycle.
- Single-model blind spots — One model can't catch its own assumptions. → Red team challenges from multiple providers (Gemini, OpenAI, Claude) surface what a single model misses.
- Knowledge loss — Context learned in one session is gone in the next. → Tiered memory management promotes frequently-used knowledge to where it's auto-loaded.
What's Different
| compound-engineering | compound-workflows | |
|---|---|---|
| Agent outputs | In-context (fills up) | Sessions last longer — agents write to disk, not context |
| Plan quality | Unbounded iteration | Plans reach quality faster — readiness checks and auto-consolidation catch issues early |
| Red team | Single model | 3 models in parallel surface what a single model misses |
| Task tracking | TodoWrite only | Survives compaction — beads preferred, TodoWrite fallback |
| Session recovery | Manual | /do:compact-prep (proactive) + /recover (reactive) |
| Memory management | None | What you learn in one session carries to the next (in progress) |
| Process analysis | None | See where your time goes and which tasks take longer than expected |
Install
/plugin marketplace add adamfeldman/compound-workflows
/plugin install compound-workflows
Warning: Do not install alongside compound-engineering. This plugin bundles all agents and skills. Installing both will cause agent name conflicts. Run
/do:setupto detect and resolve conflicts.
Then run setup to detect your environment:
/do:setup
Update
From your terminal:
claude plugin update compound-workflows@compound-workflows-marketplace
Or use the interactive /plugin menu inside Claude Code.
Commands
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
/do:setup | Detect environment, configure directories, recommend enhancements |
/do:brainstorm | Explore requirements through collaborative dialogue |
/do:plan | Transform ideas into implementation plans with research agents |
/do:deepen-plan | Enhance plans with parallel multi-model research + red-team challenges |
/do:work | Execute plans autonomously with progress tracking |
/do:review | Multi-agent code review from multiple perspectives |
/do:compound | Document solved problems to build institutional knowledge |
/do:compact-prep | Save your work before compaction — checklist for memory, commits, and resume |
/do:abandon | Session-end capture without resumption |
/compound-workflows:recover | Recover context from dead/exhausted sessions via JSONL log parsing |
/compound:*aliases still work during the v3.0 transition period.