Espalier Engineering

An espalier trains a fruit tree to grow flat along a wall — pruned, wired, productive. Espalier does the same for your AI coding agents: it reads your codebase, discovers the patterns already in it, and encodes them as machine-enforced guardrails. Generated code grows along your conventions on the first try, not the fifth.

Quick start

/plugin marketplace add Junhanliu-dev/espalier-engineering
/plugin install espalier-engineering@espalier-engineering
/espalier-init

That's it. One ~10–15 minute setup per repo, then every future change reuses it.

The problem

AI coders write plausible code that doesn't fit your codebase. They invent helpers you already have, pick libraries you don't use, and throw where your repo standardised on Result<T> years ago. It's not a model-intelligence problem — it's an unwritten rules problem. The model can't read your team's Slack history.

How it works

1. /espalier-init discovers — parallel scout agents read your code and extract the conventions nobody wrote down.
2. It writes them down — as a per-project espalier/ directory: always-loaded rules, phase-loaded skills, sub-agent definitions, a wiki, and programmatic hooks.
3. Every change is gated — a coder agent writes, a separate reviewer agent (different tool set) checks against the same rules, and hooks block pushes that skip the gates.
4. It stays honest — drift detection flags docs the code has outgrown; refreshes are gated, never silent.

espalier/
├── rules/        # always loaded: coding standards, security, production standards
├── skills/       # the pipelines: /espalier, /espalier-fix, /espalier-ask, …
├── agents/       # harness-coder / harness-reviewer / harness-security
├── wiki/         # architecture, data models, critical paths
├── hooks/        # programmatic gates: layer checks, pre-push, drift detect
├── maps/         # multi-session decision maps
└── changes/      # typed audit trail — one folder per requirement

The commands

Command	What it does
/espalier-init	One-time setup: discover conventions, generate + wire the guardrails
/espalier <feature>	Full 10-stage pipeline: grilled requirements → your approval → code → independent review → tests → gated push
/espalier-fix <bug>	Slimmer bug-fix lane that auto-links each fix to the change that caused it
/espalier-ask <question>	Read-only Q&A — answers from your docs, verified against the code, every claim sourced
/espalier-audit	Repo-wide security audit of existing code; findings hand off into fix runs
/espalier-simplify [scope]	Evidence-first simplification survey of existing code — proven cuts file as refactor changes the pipeline runs; the docs that described them get flagged for prune
/espalier-map <idea>	Plan work bigger than one session (epics, greenfield) as a decision map
/espalier-maprun	Execute a cleared map: headless workers in isolated worktrees, reviewable slice PRs
/espalier-doctor / /espalier-prune	Detect doc drift / refresh a stale doc (gated)
/espalier-migrate	Upgrade an existing install to the current version

Highlights along the way: