Operational coherence for persistent AI systems.
When AI becomes a long-running operator inside your repo -- Claude Code sessions, CLAUDE.md files, Git branches, accumulated automations -- a specific class of failures emerges. Not capability failures. Coherence failures: stale state, fragmented context, instructions that decay, lessons that don't stick. Nexus documents the patterns and gives you primitives to catch this before it compounds. These are field notes from active operations, not a fixed framework -- expect them to evolve as tooling matures.
This is for developers running persistent AI workflows -- Claude Code, Cursor, Aider, Copilot Workspace -- where operational state survives across sessions, repositories evolve over time, and instructions outlive the conversation that created them. If your AI usage is mostly isolated conversations, many of these pathologies never emerge.
Start here: paste CLAUDE-lite.md into any project (gist). Five rules, one failure log, no dependencies.
Nexus is a Claude Code plugin. Three primitives, everything local, nothing phones home.
1. Add the marketplace (one-time):
/plugin marketplace add crowcreation/nexus
2. Install:
/plugin install nexus@nexus
3. In any project:
/nexus-init
What you get:
- Session pre-flight -- verifies your branch, checks what changed, flags stale assumptions. Runs automatically.
- Failure log (
/failure) -- structured drift categories. Three occurrences of the same root cause triggers an alert. - Branch verification -- warns before committing on the wrong branch.
- Universe mapping (
/nexus-onboard) -- guided flow to document your repos, websites, tools, and projects as queryable AI context. - Field reports (
/field-report) -- formats log entries for Discussions with redaction prompts. Nothing sent automatically.
Privacy: no telemetry, no network calls, no data leaves your machine. Full source.
Requirements: Claude Code, Python 3.8+, Git.
- The Coherence Problem -- the full field guide: why persistent AI systems degrade and the five drift modes
- The Operator Stack -- five layers, from substrate to shared intelligence
- Patterns -- five steal-this patterns with implementation details
- Templates -- CLAUDE.md starter, CLAUDE-lite, failure log template
- Principles -- twelve lines
The most useful thing you can contribute is a failure you actually hit.