An artificer's kit for building minimal dark-factories on Claude Code. You compose small, gated agent steps into a deterministic build you can read end to end. The model does the work. The harness stays thin.
Built by hackers&wizards. We have spent 20+ years building and running production systems, and we teach Functional Agentic Engineering: small composable steps over sprawling harnesses. artificer is that practice as Claude Code tooling.
A "dark factory" is a lights-out production line that runs without people watching it. The usual way to get there is a giant harness that nobody can follow. artificer builds the other kind: a line small enough to hold in your head, where the model does the thinking and the harness only keeps it on track.
The build-workflow plugin scaffolds one stage at a time. Each stage gets a subagent with a gate that re-runs until its check passes, a launcher skill to run the stage on its own, and a line in a workflow script that threads each stage's output into the next.
A worked example is the sdlc line in examples/sdlc/. A feature request goes in, a tested and accepted change comes out:
plan -> tests -> implement -> simplify -+-> review-claude -+-> converge -> acceptance -> report
+-> review-codex --+ |
(real issues? loop back to implement, max 3)
Nine stages. The two reviews run in parallel, converge waits for both and loops back on real issues. Every stage is a few lines you can read. The orchestration is plain JavaScript control flow, not a black box.
Add the marketplace, then install the plugin:
/plugin marketplace add hackersandwizards/artificer
/plugin install build-workflow@hackersandwizards
/build-workflow <workflow> <order> <step>: role / models / tools / check
For example, a first stage that turns a feature request into a plan:
/build-workflow sdlc 1 plan: Turn the request into a plan with acceptance criteria / opus, high / Read, Write / true
Each call appends a stage. The check command is the contract: a stage is done only when its gate exits 0 (tests green, build clean, review complete). For parallel stages, loops, and escalation, edit the generated .claude/workflows/<workflow>.js directly. The generator embeds the recipes as comments.
The plugin also ships /improve-workflow. It runs a generated workflow on a real input, checks that its assumptions hold (gates fire, structured returns branch, parallel stages overlap), and feeds what it learns back into the workflow and the generator templates.
artificer targets Claude Code. The stages it builds are Claude Code agents, skills, and workflow scripts.
.claude-plugin/marketplace.json the marketplace manifest
plugins/build-workflow/ the build-workflow plugin
examples/sdlc/ a dark-factory built with build-workflow
MIT. See LICENSE.