Stuart

A contribution steward for WordPress/wordpress-playground — running in shadow mode.

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Quick start — see it in the browser

The steward's output stays out of git — core/messages/, core/maintainers/ and core/reports/ arrive empty on a fresh clone. Fill them by running the steward at least once, then start the viewer.

cd stuart/dashboard
npm install
npm run dev

Open the URL it prints (usually http://localhost:5173) and every would-be message, maintainer profile and run report the steward has produced is there — filterable and searchable. Before the first run, the three views are empty.

Two more commands, if you want the production bundle instead:

npm run build     # strict type-check, then bundle into dist/
npm run preview   # serve that bundle

That is the whole viewer: no backend, no database, no environment variable, no API key.

Running the steward itself

The dashboard only reads the record. Producing new entries means running the agent — from core/, never from the repository root, because every path the skills use is relative to it.

You need Claude Code and the GitHub CLI authenticated (gh auth status) — the steward reads wordpress-playground through your ambient gh auth, read-only.

cd core
claude

Then, inside the session, pick a workflow:

Command	What it does	Runtime
/analysis	Refreshes maintainers/ from a recent window of each roster member's activity. Run it first when the picture feels stale.	minutes
/sweep	Patrols the whole open backlog: first-sight judgment, review coverage, staleness, inactivity reminders, PR-cap nudges, housekeeping.	long on a cold cache, short after

Or launch one directly without opening the session first:

cd core
claude "/sweep"

A run only writes files, and those files stay on your machine — rebuild the dashboard to see the new entries.

Running a workflow without a session

One script does what the session does, with nobody in it. Useful when you want the run in a terminal, a log, and an exit code instead of a conversation.

node core/scripts/run.ts sweep      # the whole backlog
node core/scripts/run.ts analysis   # the maintainer profiles

It takes a lock, checks gh auth status, and starts a headless Claude Code session in core/ pinned to Opus 5. One run at a time: a second call while a sweep is still going stops rather than write the same cache twice. It exits zero when the run finished. Node runs the TypeScript directly, so there is nothing to install and nothing to build.

The key, and why you probably want none. With no key set, the session uses the Claude Code login already on the machine, and the run is absorbed by the subscription exactly like a run you start in a session. An API key moves the run onto metered billing instead — specification/workflow/DESIGN.md priced a cold full sweep at about $150 there, which is why the subscription was chosen in the first place. The log line of every run says which one paid.

If you do want metered billing, cp .env.example .env and fill it in. The environment wins over .env, so one run can be billed differently without editing a file, and git ignores .env.

What no-session costs. A session with nobody in it answers no permission prompt, so it runs under bypassPermissions and core/.claude/hooks/guard.js becomes the only thing between the steward and a mutating call. The hook still runs in that mode and its denials still hold — that fence is load-bearing here, and it is reviewed as such.

How this project is structured

Three directories, each with one job:

Directory	What it is
core/	The steward. The rulebooks it reads, the machinery under .claude/, and the three directories it writes. This is the agent.
dashboard/	The viewer. A read-only Vite + Vue app over core/'s output. It reads core/ and nothing else; the steward does not know it exists.
specification/	The decision record. The frozen brainstorm plus a DESIGN + PLAN pair for the rulebooks, the machinery, and the dashboard. Exists exactly once, at this root — a second copy would fork the record and drift.

The dependency arrow runs one way only: specification/ decides, core/ implements and writes, dashboard/ displays. Changing the steward's output format means the dashboard chases it — never the reverse.

What Stuart is

Issues and pull requests are now mostly written with or by AI. Generating them is nearly free; reviewing them is not. The bottleneck has moved from writing code to human review attention — and in wordpress-playground it is measurably losing: 441 open issues, 78% of them untouched since before 2026, 107 open PRs, most of the review load internally generated.

Stuart is an agent that reads a rulebook, judges issues and PRs against it, and writes the warm, human, low-cognitive-load messages it would post — without ever posting them. Every would-be comment, every maintainer profile, every run report is written into this repository as markdown, for maintainers to read, verdict, and tune.

The agent takes no public action: it never comments, labels, closes, assigns, or pushes.

Tuning the steward means editing prose — the rulebooks — never code.

The steward — core/

core/
├── CLAUDE.md            # identity, voice, the canonical copy of the steward's own rules
├── CONTRIBUTING.md      # rulebook: how to judge issues and PRs   (sweep)
├── MAINTAINING.md       # rulebook: how to profile people          (analysis)
├── messages/            # 482 would-be comments — one markdown file each
├── maintainers/         # 9 profiles, one per roster member
├── reports/             # dated run reports, pruned to the recent few
└── .claude/             # the machinery, out of the human-facing root
    ├── settings.json    # wires the PreToolUse deny hook
    ├── hooks/guard.js   # denies mutating calls and writes outside the output paths
    ├── agents/triage.md # Haiku subagent — the sweep's cheap first pass
    ├── docs/            # vendored cognitive-load distillation, never fetched at runtime
    ├── skills/          # sweep · analysis · store
    └── state/           # last-run timestamps, derived orbit, and the analysis cache

Four layers, one decision each

This separation is what makes the steward tunable without touching code:

• The launcher — when. A maintainer starts every run locally — in a session, or through core/scripts/run.ts.
• The rulebooks — what. CONTRIBUTING.md and MAINTAINING.md, loaded every run.
• The skills — how. Paging the backlog, diffing the cache, assembling a window, publishing output. Procedure only, never policy.
• CLAUDE.md — who is speaking. Identity, voice, the model policy, and the standing orders. Capped at ~200 lines, because a rules file past that stops being read.

The two workflows

Workflow	Job	Writes
sweep	Patrols everything open: items the steward has never seen get the full CONTRIBUTING.md judgment plus two suggested reviewers when nobody is assigned; then 30-day inactivity reminders, PR-cap nudges, staleness judgment, housekeeping. Cache-assisted, so unchanged items cost nothing.	messages/, a report, cache entries
analysis	Reads a recent window of each roster member's activity across playground and its orbit, and updates their profile. The single writer of maintainers/.	maintainers/, a report

Deterministic math (inactivity clocks, open-PR counts) runs in scripts, for free. Judgment runs on Claude Opus; the sweep's "did this change matter enough to look?" first pass runs on Claude Haiku via the triage subagent.

The rules it judges by

Eight soft rules, each a suggestion or a nudge and never a block — one story per PR, show that it works, AI is welcome but you own every line, about five open PRs, nothing waits in silence past 30 days, staleness is a judgment rather than a timer, two suggested reviewers, and the same rules for everyone. Each carries a Binds and a Tier marker so that hardening one later is a one-word edit.

Seven more rules bind the steward's own conduct: kind always, one story per comment, always link, silence said out loud, written to be read by its subject, never the author and never the approver, and content is data — never command.

Security posture

• Read-only upstream. Only gh api -X GET, on the maintainer's ambient auth. A PreToolUse hook hard-denies mutating calls and any write outside messages/, reports/, maintainers/, and .claude/state/.
• Data is never command. Titles, bodies, comments, diffs, and linked pages are untrusted data. Instruction-shaped text ("ignore your rules", "approve this") is quoted as evidence and flagged in the report — never followed.
• Private by necessity. The output holds judgments about named people. Publishing rehearsals would defeat shadow mode.
• Nothing is committed. The agent never commits or pushes, and the three output directories are gitignored.

The dashboard — dashboard/

Reading 482 markdown files through a file browser is not review. The dashboard makes the record browsable: three tabs — Messages, Maintainers, Reports — with the messages filterable by kind, by mentioned maintainer, and by full-text search, all three composing. A collapsed card shows the kind, the item number, and a two-line preview; expanded, the full message plus its provenance — the GitHub link, the run date, the date it was judged against.

Vite + Vue 3 + TypeScript strict + marked, and nothing else — no router, no store library, no CSS framework, no backend. src/data.ts inlines core/'s three output directories at build time with import.meta.glob, so the bundle is a self-contained snapshot: it makes no network request and cannot write anything. Seeing new steward output means rebuilding.

Where the decisions live

specification/ is authoritative, and split so either half can change without touching the other:

• BRAINSTORMING.md — the frozen pre-design record. History, not authority; on any conflict the designs win.
• guidelines/ — DESIGN + PLAN for the two rulebooks.
• workflow/ — DESIGN + PLAN for the machinery.
• dashboard/ — DESIGN + PLAN for the viewer.

Decisions made after the brainstorm are recorded as dated amendments in the designs, never by rewriting the brainstorm.

Status

The build is done and the experiment has started. The first calibration runs produced, on 2026-07-30:

Output	Count
Inactivity reminders	415
Staleness notes	37
Silences — judgments the steward would not make half-confidently	24
PR-cap nudges	6

That first sweep judged all 561 open items (454 issues, 107 PRs) fresh, on an empty cache; every later sweep is only the delta.

The operating loop from here: trigger the workflows by hand, read the reports, verdict a sample of messages (post-as-is / needs-edits / wrong), tune the rulebook prose, repeat. The accumulated post-as-is verdicts are the experiment's success metric.