Chieftain 👑

Opinionated runtime for AI coding agents. Chief framework + CLI + team orchestration + presets.

Chieftain is a full-package distribution for working with AI coding agents. It bundles the chief framework with a CLI, a parallel execution runtime, persistent state, pre-configured integrations, and opinionated defaults — so you can stop configuring and start shipping.

Chieftain is part of the chief-tribe ecosystem. It builds on chief, which builds on sage.

⚠️ Status: Planned. Chieftain is in early design. This README describes the concept and direction. Detailed implementation is still being shaped — see open issues for specifics.

Why Chieftain

sage gives you baseline behavior. chief gives you a workflow framework. Both leave plenty of decisions to you:

• Which agent CLI to use (Claude Code? OpenCode? Pi?)
• How to run multiple agents in parallel
• Where to store session state between runs
• How to configure MCP servers
• How to enforce quality gates
• What conventions to follow across projects

Chieftain answers those questions with strong defaults, so you don't have to. If you agree with the opinions, you get a productivity system. If you don't, use chief directly and configure your own way.

Who Chieftain Is For

Chieftain is for developers who:

• Want to work with AI coding agents without configuring everything from scratch
• Are comfortable adopting someone else's opinions about workflow and tooling
• Need parallel agent execution (multiple workers on independent tasks)
• Want persistent state across sessions without building it themselves
• Use a tech stack that matches one of the built-in presets

If you want to configure your own framework, use chief directly. If you want a bare baseline, use sage.

Position in the Tribe

Chieftain sits at the top of the chief-tribe stack:

┌─────────────────────────────────────────────┐
│  👑 chieftain                               │
│  ┌ CLI + team runtime + state + HUD ──┐     │
│  │                                     │     │
│  │  ⚔️  chief (framework)              │     │
│  │  ┌ roles + milestones + skills ─┐   │     │
│  │  │                               │   │     │
│  │  │  👴 sage (baseline)          │   │     │
│  │  │                               │   │     │
│  │  └───────────────────────────────┘   │     │
│  └─────────────────────────────────────┘     │
└─────────────────────────────────────────────┘

Each layer below is a proper dependency. You can drop Chieftain and keep chief+sage, or drop chief+chieftain and keep sage.

Philosophy

1. Opinion is a feature when you agree with it.

Chieftain is unapologetically opinionated. That's the point — you get a productivity system instead of a configuration surface. If the opinions don't match yours, use chief directly and configure your own runtime.

2. Runtime belongs at the top, not spread across the stack.

Sage has no runtime. Chief has no runtime. Chieftain is where runtime concerns live — CLI, orchestration, state, integrations. This keeps the lower layers portable and keeps runtime complexity opt-in.

3. Parallel agents are the default, not an exception.

Modern development is rarely sequential. You can plan one feature while another builds and a third tests. Chieftain's team runtime makes parallelism the baseline, not something you bolt on.

4. State should be observable.

Everything Chieftain does leaves a file behind. Sessions, memory, hooks, team state — all on disk, all greppable. No opaque runtime, no hidden daemon state, no "trust me" abstractions.

5. Inspired by, not derivative of.

Chieftain draws on patterns from oh-my-codex, oh-my-openagent, and Anthropic's Cowork — all of which figured out that coding agents benefit from a distribution layer. Chieftain adapts those patterns into the chief-tribe ecosystem without trying to replace them.

Roadmap

• v0.1 — CLI skeleton + project init + chief integration
• v0.2 — Session management + persistent state
• v0.3 — tmux team runtime with chief/builder parallelism
• v0.4 — HUD / status line
• v0.5 — Preset system (typescript-bun, azure)
• v0.6 — Hooks + MCP integration
• v1.0 — Stable API, documented plugin system

Follow the repo for progress updates.

Contributing

Chieftain is in early design. If you're interested in contributing:

• Open issues for design discussions
• Try chief today and share feedback on what you'd want in a runtime
• Code contributions welcome once v0.1 lands

Acknowledgements

• Yeachan-Heo's oh-my-codex and oh-my-claudecode — the clearest articulations of distribution-layer design for coding agents
• The chief-tribe community — design conversations that shaped chieftain's scope

License

MIT

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"Your chief-agent is not alone."