digitaldrywood/detent

Detent runs your engineering process with coding agents. You write issues on a board; Detent hands each ready issue to an agent on a machine you control, checks the result against the gates you defined, and lands it. Many issues run at once, each in its own isolated workspace.
A **detent** is the catch that holds a moving part at a fixed position until it is deliberately released, like the click-stop on a dial. Detent holds each piece of work at a defined stop on the board and only lets it advance when a gate is cleared.
**detent.build** has the product overview. **cloud.detent.build** is Detent Cloud.
Start with AI
Detent is meant to be set up by an agent. Paste this prompt into Codex or Claude Code from inside the repository you want Detent to work on:
How it works
Detent has two parts, both in the same detent binary.
1. **The Hub** holds the board, the issues, the conversation history, the review decisions, and the policy each project is allowed to run under. Use Detent Cloud, or run your own Hub.
2. **Runners** are machines you enroll: a laptop, a build server, a VM, or a Fly Sprite. A runner keeps your repository checkout, your agent sign-ins, and your toolchain. Nothing that touches your code runs on the Hub.
Cloud assigns each runner its allowed projects and model selection. The runner's
global.yaml holds machine settings only. It clones missing linked repositories
and reads each repository's current default-branch project definition.
A project's behavior lives in two files that you commit to the repository:
- detent.yaml is the machine contract: lanes, gate command, review policy, scheduling, retries, and budgets.
- WORKFLOW.md is the agent contract: how to work in this repository and what done means.
The runner reports the resolved policy to the Hub, and an owner approves it before work runs. A changed detent.yaml needs a new approval, so a commit cannot quietly widen what agents may do.
Work then moves through the board:
1. **You put an issue in Todo.** A runner that holds the project claims it, creates an isolated worktree, and starts an agent (Codex or Claude Code) with the issue and WORKFLOW.md. The issue moves to In Progress.
2. **The agent works** on its own branch and runs your gate command. When it commits, the runner publishes a Change Request on the Hub with the diff.
3. **Gates decide.** With review.human: false an accepted change goes straight to Merging. With review.human: true it waits in Human Review until a person approves it or sends it back with requested changes.
4. **Landing is serialized.** In Merging the runner that holds the project lands the change on the base branch with plain git, one change at a time, and the Hub moves the issue to Done. A change that cannot land goes to Blocked with its reason.
Native projects make no GitHub API calls by default; git clone and push still work against any host. GitHub is an optional integration for importing issues and projecting summaries. See GitHub profiles.
Get started on Detent Cloud
1. Sign in at cloud.detent.build and create or join an organization.
2. Create a project. New projects start with Todo, In Progress, Merging, Done, Blocked, and Human Review.
3. Commit detent.yaml and WORKFLOW.md to the repository (the Start with AI prompt drafts them).
4. Install Detent on the runner machine, and sign in there to the agent you plan to use (codex login or claude auth login).