Conclave is a Claude Code plugin that gives a team of AI advisors and executors a persistent memory, hard role boundaries, a mandatory session lifecycle, and a feedback loop that turns recurring mistakes into durable edits to the agents' own skills.
Install · See it work · Configuration · Commands · Docs
Important
What it touches (local-only). /conclave:init runs python3 engine scripts that create a
.conclave/ data tree in your repo, write .conclave/roster.yaml, mint an advisor into
.claude/agents/, and register a SessionStart hook in your project's .claude/settings.json.
No telemetry. There is one outbound network call: a GitHub issue/board sync that runs
automatically at the start of every advisor session — it is not opt-in. It shells out to the
gh CLI, using the plugin's GH_TOKEN setting if you configured one and your own gh auth
session otherwise. The sync happens only when a repo scope resolves: github.ai_repo /
github.main_repo in .conclave/roster.yaml, falling back to your project's origin remote.
With neither, it refuses and makes no call rather than searching your account. There is currently
no switch to disable it while a scope is resolvable.
Reversibility. Remove the SessionStart hook from .claude/settings.json, delete .conclave/ and
the minted .claude/agents/*.md, then /plugin uninstall conclave. Nothing persists outside your repo.
| Requirement | Why |
|---|---|
| Python 3.11+ | The engine's runtime. The floor is enforced at every entrypoint, which refuses older interpreters with a plain message rather than a traceback. macOS ships 3.9 as /usr/bin/python3, so a system-Python run will hit this. |
uv |
Provisions the engine's dependencies into a plugin-local venv on first run. Without it, install those four packages yourself: PyYAML, python-frontmatter, pydantic, ruamel.yaml. |
gh, authenticated |
The GitHub issue/board sync shells out to it. Run gh auth status to confirm. On failure, session-init reports the error in the session-start block, prints a degraded: gh-data-unavailable line and continues — the briefing still builds, with board-derived sections served from the cached snapshot, which is left untouched rather than overwritten. Conclave is usable without gh; only the board sections go stale. |
| git | Session state and the repo-scope fallback both read your project's git metadata. |
Conclave ships as its own marketplace, so install is two steps.
From GitHub:
/plugin marketplace add ignromanov/conclave
/plugin install conclave
From a local clone (dev loop — edit skills/agents and reinstall without pushing):
/plugin marketplace add . # or an absolute path to the repo
/plugin install conclave
The hard dependency agent-teams auto-enables. Then bootstrap your project once:
/conclave:init
Most "multi-agent" systems are orchestration — they make a team of agents busier. They don't fix the two failures that actually compound: agents forget everything between sessions, and they repeat the same mistakes because nothing closes the loop on feedback.
If you've run spec-driven development or kept an engineering decision log, you already know half the fix — durable records that survive the session. What Conclave adds is the governance + learning layer on top: persona-driven advisors with hard scope boundaries run every session through a mandatory lifecycle, write to an append-only memory, and emit structured feedback. A loop then verifies that feedback — items already satisfied get closed, and recurring, verified patterns are promoted into edits to the agents' own skills and contracts.
Honest status. The learning loop is human-gated (L1) today — nominations surface for your approval; the agents do not yet rewrite themselves autonomously. See
VISION.mdfor the founding intent anddocs/architecture/for the corrected mechanism.
> /plugin marketplace add ignromanov/conclave
✓ marketplace 'conclave-marketplace' added
> /plugin install conclave
✓ conclave@0.2.0 installed (agent-teams enabled via dependencies)
> /conclave:init
project name? voidpay
github owner? ignromanov
✓ created .conclave/{agent-memory,ops,wiki}/
✓ wrote .conclave/roster.yaml
✓ minted .claude/agents/advisor.md
✓ hook SessionStart registered in .claude/settings.json
next → /conclave:start
> /conclave:start
advisor session begins — briefing loaded from .conclave/agent-memory/, lifecycle armed
- Install the plugin (above).
/conclave:init— once per project. Idempotent; re-running won't duplicate the roster, wiki, advisor, or hook./conclave:start— begin an advisor session. Every session flows through the lifecycle (start → processing → work → done → handoff) so work never drifts from its record./conclave:hire— grow the roster with domain advisors as the project needs them. Conclave ships clean: just the engine plus the always-present meta-role Forge; the domain roster is hired fresh per project.
Conclave does not use a .claude/conclave.local.md settings file. Configuration lives in two places:
| Where | What |
|---|---|
userConfig.GH_TOKEN (plugin manifest) |
Optional, sensitive. Exposed to engine subprocesses as CLAUDE_PLUGIN_OPTION_GH_TOKEN; falls back to gh auth token. Never written into roster.yaml or settings.json. |
.conclave/roster.yaml (per project) |
Project identity, GitHub owner, knowledge/wiki config (096 nested schema). Written by /conclave:init. |
After editing the SessionStart hook or settings.json, restart Claude Code — hooks are not hot-swapped within a session.
| Plugin | Role |
|---|---|
agent-teams |
Hard dependency — auto-enabled on install (from the claude-code-workflows marketplace). Provides the parallel team primitives the executors dispatch onto. |
llm-obsidian-wiki |
Companion — the wiki vault is scaffolded by Conclave's engine at init; install the plugin if you want its curation/answer skills over the vault. |
| Command | Purpose |
|---|---|
/conclave:init |
Bootstrap .conclave/, roster, first advisor, and the SessionStart hook. Run once. |
/conclave:start |
Begin an advisor session (loads briefing, arms the lifecycle). |
/conclave:processing |
Enter the processing phase of the lifecycle. |
/conclave:done |
Close out work and write the session record. |
/conclave:handoff |
Hand the session off with a durable summary. |
/conclave:hire |
Add a domain advisor to the roster. |
/conclave:forge |
Invoke Forge — the agent factory / self-improvement meta-role. |
/conclave:feedback |
Emit structured feedback into the loop. |
/conclave:triage |
Triage open feedback items. |
/conclave:retro |
Run a retrospective over recent sessions. |
Advisors and executors run as a coherent organization: persona-driven roles with distinct voices and scope boundaries, task-scoped workers with strict file-ownership, a mandatory lifecycle, an append-only memory under auto-generated briefings, and a feedback loop gated by an external verifier so wrong lessons are demoted, never reinforced.
Architecture & design rationale
Start with VISION.md, then your instance's project-context.md (canonical identity;
/conclave:init scaffolds it into .conclave/) and constitution.md (binding
governance principles). The seven architecture principles — file-as-message-bus · cache-over-truth ·
mandatory lifecycle · spec-driven · confidence-graduated authority · never-silent-delete ·
guardrails-as-first-class — are defined in VISION.md §6.
The engine was built in-place inside VoidPay's .ai/ and extracted into this repo as an installable
plugin (spec 098). VoidPay remains the proving ground, not the parent.
| Area | Doc |
|---|---|
| Architecture | overview · engine-modules · roster-and-forge · memory-and-knowledge · lifecycle |
| Functionality | functionality — end-to-end capability catalog |
| Contract | instance-contract · SCHEMA — what an instance owes the engine, and the file schemas |
Working documents — specs, plans, research, product and migration notes — are not shipped: they
are the instance's own record and live in its private DATA tree (.conclave/ops/). docs/ here
carries descriptive architecture only, and a gate enforces it
(engine/scripts/tests/test_gates.py::test_working_docs_not_in_code).
VoidPay (~/code/vl/) is the proving ground, not the parent. The system was born there and is
dogfooded there; Conclave is the standalone project that owns its design and productization. The same
engine is built to run on other projects (Vault, SafeUnfollow) and, per the Track-B path, on small
businesses as a product.
Status: packaged and installable (v0.2.0); design doc-set captured 2026-06-11. License: MIT.