I Built a CLI to Replace Expensive AI Directive Generation
The friction point is simple to describe. Claude designs the architecture. Windsurf builds it. The directive that connects them — structured, scoped, phase-gated — gets written by me, by hand, every single time.
I’m the middleware. I built a tool to replace myself. It didn’t quite work.
OpenAgent started from a real observation: the same context was being re-explained in every session. I had architectural patterns, stop rules, test floor conventions — and every new Windsurf session, the agent had no idea any of it existed. The directive was the missing connective tissue. Write it well and the agent stays on scope. Write it badly and the agent invents its own architecture.
So I built a CLI that reads the codebase, understands the structure, and generates directives shaped to my development style. The breakthrough was SOUL.md — eight questions about how I actually work. That profile gets embedded in every directive. When OpenAgent generates something, it references the right conventions, names the right stop conditions. It sounds like something I’d write.
It’s on PyPI as openagent-directive. v0.2.2. 103 passing tests.
Here’s the part I didn’t put in the README: I still do the same manual cycle.
The tool works. The directives it generates are useful. But I’m still the one handing them to Windsurf, watching the session, course-correcting when it goes sideways. The friction I wanted to eliminate is still there because the real blocker isn’t the directive — it’s that there’s no coding agent that lives outside an IDE.
Windsurf, Cursor, Copilot — they all require a human in the seat. The autonomous loop I wanted, where OpenAgent feeds a directive to a coding agent that executes independently, reports back, and waits for the next one, doesn’t exist yet in any reliable form. The IDE-bound constraint kills the automation before it starts.
I built a correct solution to the wrong layer of the problem.
The pivot I keep thinking about: OpenAgent as an MCP tool. Not a CLI that generates directives for humans to hand off, but a codebase intelligence layer that a coding agent can query directly. What files are in scope? What’s the test floor? What patterns does this codebase use? An agent with access to that context doesn’t need a human to write the directive — it can construct its own.
That version of OpenAgent is waiting on the ecosystem. When a capable coding agent exists that can operate outside an IDE, receive a structured task, execute against a real codebase, and return proof — OpenAgent is already positioned to be the interpreter it needs.
For now it’s a CLI on PyPI that saves me twenty minutes per directive and reminds me that some problems can’t be fully solved until the infrastructure around them catches up.
The friction is still there. The tool is ready when it isn’t.