Medley — missions inside Claude Code

Medley turns a complex, multi-step goal into a supervised swarm. /mission <your goal> makes your Claude Code session the mission agent: it interviews you, decomposes the goal into a task DAG with per-task model routing, and supervises parallel in-repo workers (Claude Code, Codex, and Cursor) that inherit your full setup — skills, MCP servers, CLAUDE.md, permission grants, subscription auth. A live localhost dashboard streams every worker, surfaces approvals, and lets you steer in plain language.

This repository is the public plugin. The mission engine ships as a separate, self-contained binary that the plugin downloads for you on first run — no auth, no Node, no build step, nothing to clone.

Install

Inside Claude Code:

/plugin marketplace add Spine-AI/medley
/plugin install medley

That's it. Your next session downloads the engine automatically (a single code-signed binary from engine.getmedley.ai, with the public GitHub Release as fallback — no token, no npm), then everything just works. No --plugin-dir, no build toolchain.

Then: /mission <your goal> → answer the interview → review the proposed DAG (each task's routed runtime + model) → say "go". Steer with plain language ("tell the UI task to use shadcn", "kill the flaky one"). Open the dashboard any time with /dashboard.

Statusline — a one-line mission ticker (medley ▸ <title> · RUNNING · 4/9 while a mission runs, empty when no mission is active) is set up automatically. On first session Medley adds a statusLine entry to your ~/.claude/settings.json pointing at a stable copy it refreshes each session (~/.medley/statusline.sh), so it survives plugin updates. It never touches a statusline you already have. To turn it off, delete the statusLine block from your settings.json (Medley won't re-add it); a full uninstall removes it for you.

Requirements

• macOS on Apple Silicon (arm64). The engine is a self-contained binary — Node is not required. (Intel Macs are not supported; on other platforms the plugin no-ops cleanly.)
• The claude CLI on your PATH (workers spawn via the Claude Agent SDK for subscription auth).
• Optional: the codex CLI (codex login) to add Codex workers to the routing pool.
• Optional: the agent CLI (agent login, from cursor.com/install) to add Cursor workers to the routing pool.
• Any subset works — Medley auto-discovers whichever of these are installed and logged in, and routes only among the runtimes actually present.

Update

Engine updates are shipped by bumping the plugin. Refresh and update:

/plugin marketplace update medley
/plugin update medley

The next session detects the new pinned engine version and downloads it automatically; the running engine daemon rolls itself forward to the new version on next use (only ever forward, never back to an older one), then prunes the superseded binaries so only the current engine remains.

Develop (this plugin)

The plugin is self-contained; the only moving part is how it finds the engine. scripts/resolve-engine.sh picks, in order: $MEDLEY_ENGINE (dev override) → the downloaded binary under ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_DATA}/bin/medley-engine-<version> → the path cached in ~/.medley/engine-path.

To hack on the plugin against a local engine build (from the private medley-engine repo):

# in the engine repo:  npm install && npm run build   → produces dist/medley-engine.cjs
MEDLEY_ENGINE=/path/to/medley-engine/dist/medley-engine.cjs \
  claude --plugin-dir /path/to/medley/plugin

Validate before pushing:

claude plugin validate ./plugin --strict

See CLAUDE.md for contributor notes (the marketplace-cache constraints, the engine-install idiom, and what must never land in this public repo).

What's inside

.claude-plugin/marketplace.json   the "medley" marketplace catalog (lists this plugin)
plugin/
  .claude-plugin/plugin.json      plugin manifest
  .mcp.json                       registers the medley MCP server (via scripts/run-engine.sh)
  hooks/hooks.json                SessionStart reminder + PreToolUse edit-conflict gate
  scripts/                        {resolve,ensure,run}-engine.sh, session-start.sh, statusline.sh,
                                  edit-conflict-gate.py
  engine/version                  pins the engine version the plugin downloads (release-managed)
  skills/mission, skills/dashboard the /mission and /dashboard skills (+ per-runtime routing guides)

Security & privacy

What this plugin does on your machine, stated plainly:

• Downloads and runs a compiled binary. On session start the plugin downloads the Medley engine — a closed-source, self-contained executable — from engine.getmedley.ai (Cloudflare R2), falling back to the public GitHub Release. The version is pinned in plugin/engine/version (release-managed), the download is verified against the release's SHA256SUMS, and the binary is Developer ID code-signed (not notarized — a CLI fetched via curl is never quarantined, so Gatekeeper's notarization check does not apply).
• Runs a background daemon. The engine installs a single launchd LaunchAgent (ai.getmedley.daemon) so missions keep running between sessions. It binds to 127.0.0.1:8730 only — the MCP server and dashboard are never exposed off-host, and /api + /mcp require a local bearer token or same-origin browser request.
• Local state. Mission state lives in SQLite under ~/.medley/; nothing is synced anywhere.
• Telemetry is consent-gated and content-free. Usage telemetry (PostHog) and crash reports (Sentry) are only sent with consent, and events carry enums, counts, durations, and exit codes only — never prompts, file contents, paths, or repo names. (The pipeline currently ships disabled.)
• Workers run with your own auth. Spawned workers use the claude / codex / agent CLIs already installed and logged in on your machine; the plugin never handles your credentials.

Uninstall: /plugin uninstall medley unregisters the plugin but leaves the daemon and state behind — run plugin/scripts/uninstall.sh for a complete removal (LaunchAgent, downloaded binaries, ~/.medley/ state; --dry-run shows the plan first, --keep-data preserves mission history).

License

The code in this repository — the plugin shim (scripts, hooks, skills, manifests) — is MIT-licensed; see LICENSE. Medley itself is not open source: the mission engine the plugin downloads is proprietary, closed-source software © Spine, distributed only as a compiled binary and licensed for use with Medley. The MIT grant does not extend to the engine.