Shiftwork

Autonomous coding agents that work in shifts. Every ticket gets a fresh shift (a clean context). When a model uses up its budget or hits a provider limit, it hands the shift over to the next model, possibly from another provider.

Status: early development (0.x). How to set it up and use it: docs/guide.md. The design is in RESEARCH.md (Ukrainian).

What it does

• Fresh context per ticket. Tickets are Markdown files in .scratch/<feature>/issues/NN-*.md, in the mattpocock-skills local tracker format (or OpenSpec changes). Only a ticket's Verify commands decide that it is done.
• The runner is the orchestrator. shiftwork run works the frontier on its own, feature by feature, one ticket after another (or --parallel N), each in its own git worktree, and merges a ticket only when its gate passes.
• Review before merge. By default a fresh agent on your strongest tier reviews each ticket's branch before it lands: accept merges it, reopen sends it back with the findings, follow-up files a new ticket.
• Per-type model routing and skill tiers. A cheap model for git and docs, a strong one for refactors; untyped tickets can be classified by Jev. Weaker models get more skills, preloaded.
• Budgets with handoff. Limits on tokens, cost, turns, time, context and stalls. Past a limit, or on a provider rate or usage limit, the shift is handed to the next model, with a cooldown shared by every worker. Limits can be lifted per run, tier, model or backend.
• Backends: pi (any pi provider, OpenRouter, xAI and local Ollama models included), Claude Code, Codex, OpenCode, Grok Build and Cursor.
• Live dashboard. shiftwork tui: the queue with readable statuses, live agents, budgets, cooldowns and logs; run, stop, pause a feature, search, mouse.
• Dark-factory mode. shiftwork run --dark-factory takes work from your repo's GitHub issues (collaborators only, by label), plans and builds it, and reports back on the issue with links to the commits.

The shiftwork skill

One install command per harness (the same skill: writing tickets, running the runner, reviewing a ticket's work):

Harness	Command
pi	pi install npm:pi-shiftwork
Claude Code	/plugin marketplace add Ivlad003/shiftwork, then /plugin install shiftwork@shiftwork
OpenCode · Codex · Cursor	npx degit Ivlad003/shiftwork/skills/shiftwork .agents/skills/shiftwork

The skill lives at skills/shiftwork/ (packaged into packages/pi and the Claude Code plugin in plugins/shiftwork; npm run sync-skills refreshes the copies). To keep it on a checkout instead of a one-off copy, link it: ln -s <shiftwork-checkout>/skills/shiftwork .agents/skills/shiftwork.

Quick start

npx shiftwork@latest init --model anthropic/claude-sonnet-4-5
npx shiftwork@latest run --dry-run

Needs Node ≥ 22 and pi (npm i -g @earendil-works/pi-coding-agent). Or install the CLI once: npm i -g shiftwork.

Packages

Package	npm	What
shiftwork	npmjs.com/package/shiftwork	CLI (npx shiftwork)
shiftwork-core	npmjs.com/package/shiftwork-core	Ticket parsing and frontier, with no pi or OpenCode dependencies
pi-shiftwork	npmjs.com/package/pi-shiftwork	pi package (pi install npm:pi-shiftwork)
opencode-shiftwork	npmjs.com/package/opencode-shiftwork	OpenCode V2 plugin (in development)

License

MIT