bvandeusenandClaude Opus 5
76bf21633e
I recorded this as project rule 174 first. That was wrong twice over, and the second reason is the one that matters. RULE 119 SAYS THIS EXACTLY: guidance about how an agent should behave with Scribe belongs in `_INSTRUCTIONS`, `plugin/skills/*` or the adapter's static context, never in the corpus. I read 119 while writing the rule, decided it was "about authority rather than about using Scribe", and wrote it anyway — which is the reasoning preference 29 exists to catch, performed in full. THE REASON THAT MATTERS: a rule in the corpus is true on ONE install. If the agent being the judge is how Scribe works, every install gets it or none does. Baked in, it ships. As a rule it was one operator's private note about a product stance. WHAT IT SAYS. The agent is the judge of record for the work — what a shape is, whether a finding holds, whether something is done. Surfacing a finding for the operator to rule on is the judgment NOT made, however well written up: it reads as diligence and functions as a backlog. Escalate the acts that are genuinely theirs — their money, their infrastructure, anything hard to reverse or facing outward — and keep the decisions. A hard call is still yours; an irreversible act is still theirs. And the half that keeps this from becoming the previous defect: JUDGING IS ATTENDED. An agent reading evidence and recording why is judgment; a threshold or a sweep reclassifying in bulk with nobody reading is the thing that fills a ledger with confident nonsense (#4208, and Portal's 35 rows). When the fix for bad unattended writes is another unattended write, stop. THE PRODUCT WAS TEACHING THE OPPOSITE. reporting-back's Finding row read "Symptom · Cause · Size of the fix · **Offer to fix it**". So the behaviour I was corrected for is the behaviour the skill prescribed — which is the better argument for fixing it here than any rule could be. Three surfaces, per 119 and the ownership registry (#4027): `_INSTRUCTIONS` gets a one-line JUDGE index entry; using-scribe owns the authority and the attended/unattended distinction; reporting-back owns the report shape. Two topics rather than one, registered separately in test_guidance_ownership so trimming one cannot quietly take the other. Plugin version minted — skills only reach a session when the manifest moves (#2209). Rule 174 deleted (trash 074434a2, recoverable). Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 <noreply@anthropic.com> Claude-Session: https://claude.ai/code/session_01821k5B3Ysecp9fNYs92Kuy
Fabled Scribe
A self-hosted work system-of-record for software projects, built to be driven by Claude Code. Notes, tasks, issues, projects, milestones, rules, and stored processes — reachable from Claude via a built-in MCP endpoint and a bundled Claude Code plugin, with a clean web UI for humans. No in-app LLM; Claude is the sole assistant.
Features
Notes and tasks with a Markdown editor, sub-tasks, milestones, issues, and kanban project workspaces. Stored processes, an engineering rulebook system (with an inception step that decides what each project inherits), and semantic search with proactive knowledge-injection into Claude's context. A knowledge graph, per-user/group sharing, and a built-in MCP server (/mcp) plus a bundled Claude Code plugin so Claude can record and recall your work directly.
Quick Start
Prerequisites: Docker and Docker Compose. No GPU or local model needed — Claude is the sole assistant, reached over MCP.
Download docker-compose.quickstart.yml from this repo, then:
# Optional but recommended — set a secret key
export SECRET_KEY=your-random-secret-here
docker compose -f docker-compose.quickstart.yml up -d
Open http://localhost:5000. The first user to register becomes admin. To connect Claude, create an API key under Settings → API Keys and install the Claude Code plugin — see API Keys & MCP.
Development: To build from source, see Development.
Documentation
| Doc | Contents |
|---|---|
| Architecture | Stack, design decisions, data models, key services |
| Configuration | Environment variables, Docker Compose, production setup, security |
| Features | Detailed feature breakdown and keyboard shortcuts |
| Development | Dev workflow, CI/CD, migrations, release process |
| API Keys & MCP | API key management and Fable MCP install guide |
| SSO / OAuth | OIDC setup for Authentik, Keycloak, and other providers |
| API Reference | All REST API endpoints |
License
This project is privately maintained.