roundhouse

Roundhouse

A Claude Code plugin that simulates a Rails development team. Orchestrator on Opus, specialists on Sonnet, prompt-refiner once per task, TDD by default for cross-cutting work, conditional security/database gates.

The orchestrator triages each task into one of three tiers (trivial / single-domain / cross-cutting) and dispatches only the specialists actually needed. Trivial work bypasses the team entirely; cross-cutting work runs tests-first and applies gates only when the change touches their concerns.

A roundhouse is the rail facility where locomotives are serviced and dispatched onto the right track. Sister tool to railwyrm (which forges the rail).

Why this exists

Rails AI-coding tools that fan out specialists for every change waste 60–80% of their cost on the orchestrator chatting with itself. Roundhouse keeps the orchestrator on Opus only when planning is needed, runs specialists on Sonnet when execution is needed, and skips the team entirely for trivial work — measured 7×–34× cheaper and 2×–7× faster than the comparable claude-on-rails v0.4 swarm across 10 representative Rails tasks.

See BENCHMARK.md for the full evidence.

Bench results

10 tasks, 3 tiers, paired runs against claude-on-rails v0.4. Same prompt, same models (Opus orchestrator, Sonnet specialists), same /prompt-refiner directive on both sides.

Task	Tier	v0.4 swarm	Roundhouse	Plugin wins by
Fix flash typo	trivial	$9.10 / 3m9s	$0.36 / 30s	25.6× cheaper, 6.3× faster
Add missing translation	trivial	$11.90 / 2m44s	$0.35 / 23s	33.6× cheaper, 7.1× faster
Add unique-slug validation + index (TDD)	single-domain	$13.19 / 5m26s	$0.70 / 2m42s	18.9× cheaper, 2.0× faster
Add Post.recent scope (TDD)	single-domain	$10.01 / 4m39s	$0.61 / 2m3s	16.5× cheaper, 2.3× faster
Extract service object (TDD)	single-domain	$19.78 / 8m15s	$1.68 / 4m25s	11.8× cheaper, 1.9× faster
Write missing User specs	tests-only	$6.71 / 2m15s	$0.48 / 1m25s	14.1× cheaper, 1.6× faster
Add Comment resource (TDD)	cross-cutting	$21.93 / 14m4s	$1.52 / 6m30s	14.4× cheaper, 2.2× faster
Add publish notification job (TDD)	cross-cutting	$12.95 / 6m54s	$1.83 / 4m22s	7.1× cheaper, 1.6× faster
Add admin API + auth + rate limit (TDD)	cross-cutting	$18.17 / 16m20s	$2.65 / 8m55s	6.9× cheaper, 1.8× faster
Refactor sync→async report (TDD)	cross-cutting	$4.55 / 2m34s ⚠️	$6.25 / 33m38s	swarm shipped no code; plugin shipped 16 files / 34 specs
Totals (all 10)		$128.29 / 66 min	$16.43 / 65 min	7.8× cheaper overall

⚠️ T3.4 swarm produced an extensive 250-line refined plan via /prompt-refiner then ran out of architect budget before delegating to a single specialist. No code was written. The plugin's same task delivered a complete async refactor with single-use signed URLs, an atomic single-use guard, and 34 spec examples.

Excluding the swarm-incomplete task, plugin wins by an average of 15.0× on cost and 2.1× on time across the 9 tasks both systems completed.

Install

Recommended — via the kurenn marketplace

claude plugin marketplace add kurenn/marketplace   # one-time per user
claude plugin install roundhouse@kurenn            # one-time install

Restart your Claude Code session after install and the /rails-feature, /rails-bugfix, and specialist-mode skills appear in the slash menu.

Local plugin dir (development / contributing)

git clone https://github.com/kurenn/roundhouse ~/workspace/roundhouse
claude --plugin-dir ~/workspace/roundhouse

Updating

When a new version is released, pull it via the marketplace:

# Refresh the marketplace cache (picks up new versions from marketplace.json)
claude plugin marketplace update kurenn

# Update roundhouse to the latest released version
claude plugin update roundhouse

Restart your Claude Code session after updating so the slash menu picks up the new version.

Verify which version you're on:

claude plugin list | grep -A3 roundhouse@kurenn

To pin to a specific older version (e.g. for rollback while debugging a regression), clone the tag locally and load via --plugin-dir:

git clone https://github.com/kurenn/roundhouse --branch v1.0.1 ~/workspace/roundhouse-1.0.1
claude --plugin-dir ~/workspace/roundhouse-1.0.1

Usage

Team mode — /rails-feature

For any feature work where you want triage + dispatch:

/rails-feature add a Post.recent scope returning posts from the last 7 days, ordered newest first