Welcome to Arness

[fredcallagan]

Arness is a plugin marketplace for Claude Code that adds structured workflows to AI-assisted development — from first idea through production deploy.

If you've ever started a project with Claude Code and wished there was more scaffolding around the process — a way to go from vague concept to spec to plan to working code without losing context along the way — that's what this is for.

What's here

Three plugins, 134 skills and agents, all independently installable:

Arness Spark — Start here when you have an idea but no code yet. Product discovery, persona generation, competitive research, architecture evaluation, interactive prototyping. Kick things off with /arn-brainstorming.

Arness Code — The development backbone. Spec, plan, execute, review, ship — with three ceremony tiers (swift/standard/thorough) that scale process to match scope. Start with /arn-planning or /arn-implementing.

Arness Infra (experimental) — Containerization, IaC, CI/CD pipelines, environment management, monitoring. One entry point: /arn-infra-wizard.

Everything is MIT licensed and plain Markdown. No proprietary formats, no lock-in. If you stop using Arness tomorrow, your specs and plans are still just files in your repo.

The whole thing was built with itself, which was either a good test of the system or a questionable life choice. Probably both.

Why it works

A few things that matter in practice:

• Drop it into any existing project. Arness doesn't need a fresh repo or a migration. Install a plugin, run a command, and it adapts to whatever codebase you're already working in — your conventions, your structure, your tools.
• It learns how you work. On first run, Arness captures your role, tech stack, preferred frameworks, and development conventions. Every session after that is tailored to your skill set and context — not generic boilerplate.
• Context flows end to end. This is the core idea. A product concept feeds the spec, the spec feeds the plan, the plan feeds execution, execution feeds the review, the review feeds the PR. Nothing is orphaned. The context you build in discovery is still there when you're shipping.

Getting started

# Add the marketplace (one-time)
/plugin marketplace add AppsVortex/arness

# Install the plugins you need
/plugin install arn-spark@arn-marketplace   # New product from scratch
/plugin install arn-code@arn-marketplace    # Development pipeline
/plugin install arn-infra@arn-marketplace   # Infrastructure & deployment

Install one, two, or all three — each works independently, but combined they give you the full pipeline from idea to production. Zero config — Arness asks your preferences once and remembers them. Check the README and Getting Started guide for the full walkthrough.

This isn't day one

This is the first public release, but Arness has been in active use for months. It was developed, tested, and refined with a close group of colleagues and friends before going open source. The version numbers reflect that history — Arness Code is at v3.2.0, Spark and Infra at v2.2.0. What you're getting isn't a proof of concept; it's a tool that's already been through real-world iteration.

That said, opening it up means new workflows, new codebases, and new edge cases we haven't seen yet. If something doesn't work the way you'd expect, that's useful — open an issue or start a discussion.

This is your community

We're building this in the open and want to hear from you:

• Questions? Post in Q&A
• Feature ideas? Drop them in Ideas
• Built something cool? Show it off in Show and tell
• Bug reports and feature requests — Issues

Contributions are welcome — whether that's bug reports, new skill ideas, or PRs. The codebase is all Markdown, so the barrier to entry is low. See CONTRIBUTING.md to get started.

Thanks for being here. Let's build something good together.

— Fryderyk / AppsVortex