| name | meow |
| description | meow — Nine Lives heartbeat for Claude Code. Run a life cycle (birth → phase → exit contract → rebirth), check status, review pending gates, or spawn a one-shot task. Trigger with "run meow", "one life", "grind the mountain", "meow status", "meow -p <task>", "meow live", "meow --target <repo>". |
meow — the heartbeat (Nine Lives exoskeleton)
A CLI harness that orchestrates Claude Code sessions as "lives" — each life is one role doing one phase. The heartbeat assembles context, spawns claude -p, enforces the exit contract via governor scripts, and decides rebirth.
Driver
.claude/skills/meow/driver.mjs — wraps bun bin/meow.ts. All paths relative to repo root.
Commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|
meow status | Show PROBLEM, ledger tail, budget, next role:phase |
meow -p "<task>" | One-shot: one life, one task, exit contract, death |
meow live [--lives N] | Loop: rebirth until budget/review halt (default 9 lives) |
meow review | Show pending human gates (the leash) |
meow birth | Debug: print the birth prompt, spawn nothing |
meow mock | Test: mocked end-to-end life (no real LLM) |
Run a life cycle
bun bin/meow.ts -p "fix the auth bug in src/auth.ts"
Check status
bun bin/meow.ts status
Run the loop (9 lives default)
bun bin/meow.ts live
Run N lives
bun bin/meow.ts live --lives 3
Run against a target repo (default: ~/github/meow)
bun bin/meow.ts --target ~/github/flint status
node driver.mjs --target ~/github/flint status
Prerequisites
- Bun (TypeScript runtime) —
bun --version should work
- Python 3 —
python3 --version should work
ANTHROPIC_API_KEY env var set
Architecture
bin/meow.ts — heartbeat entry point (supports --target <path>)scripts/ — governor scripts (budget.py, ship_gate.py, schedule.py)skills/meow/ — role skills (dispatched per life).meow/ — state directory (ledger.md, brain.db, verifiers/, etc.)
Exit contract
Every life must:
- Append one entry to
.meow/ledger.md
- Distill to the brain via
brain_cli.py
- Serialize WIP to
.meow/tasks/
- Write
reviews/pending-*.md for anything external/irreversible
- Read back every file written — title-only stubs are failed writes
Gotchas
- The heartbeat runs
ship_gate.py after each life — FAIL from the gate is final. Do not edit the gate or verifiers to route around it.
- Budget check runs before every life unless
MEOW_SKIP_BUDGET=1.
--dangerously-skip-permissions is passed to claude -p — ensure ANTHROPIC_API_KEY is set or the spawn will fail silently.- Use
--target <path> to operate on a different repo's .meow/ instead of the default (~/github/meow).
