nWave

AI agents that guide you from idea to working code, with human judgment at every gate.

nWave runs inside Claude Code. It breaks feature delivery into seven waves (discover, diverge, discuss, design, devops, distill, deliver). Specialized agents produce artifacts at each wave. You review and approve before proceeding.

Documentation: docs.nwave.ai — guides, reference, and explanations, versioned per release.

Install in 5 Minutes

Requirements: Python 3.10+ and Claude Code.

sh -c "$(curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/nWave-ai/nWave/main/scripts/install/install.sh)"

This installs the nwave-ai CLI and wires nWave into Claude Code in one step. It uses uv when available (recommended); pipx is supported but not recommended. Restart Claude Code when it finishes.

Need CLI flags, environment variables, CI/non-interactive use, or manual and offline steps? See the Installation Guide.

Your First Command

Inside Claude Code, type:

/nw-buddy What should I do next?

The buddy reads your project and tells you which wave to start, where your artifacts are, and how to use nWave for your specific context. It works on day one with no configuration.

Before nWave: "Where do I start? Requirements doc or code first? Which agent?" After nWave: The buddy reads your project and gives you a concrete next step.

Using pipx, OpenCode, or Codex instead? See the Installation Guide.

Learn More

Resource	What it covers
Your First Feature	End-to-end walkthrough, zero to working code
Team Rollout Guide	Onboard a second developer onto an nWave project
Offline / Air-Gapped Install	Install nWave on a machine without PyPI access
Jobs To Be Done	Which wave fits your task
Wave Directory Structure	How artifacts are organized per feature
Feature Delta Format (L7)	Author features in the lean single-file model
Outcomes Registry	Catch duplicate rules and operations at design time
Configuring Doc Density	Control lean vs full wave output
Agents and Commands Reference	All agents and commands
Troubleshooting	Common issues and fixes

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Latest Maintenance Release: v3.22.1

nWave v3.22.1 is the current corrective maintenance release for the v3 line. It carries forward the twelve community fixes that are already present in published 3.22.0, across installation, configuration, finalization, diagnostics, repository hygiene, command discovery, and contributor guidance:

Thank you to everyone in the community who reported these problems and helped make nWave better.

• delivery guidance keeps the hand-off green for squash, rebase, and fast-forward-only workflows (#56);
• the installed outcomes registry now includes the schema it needs (#63);
• relative DES log paths are anchored to the worktree root (#79);
• platform and delivery architecture work is routed to the appropriate specialist (#81);
• finalization preserves feature workspace history while removing transient session state (#83);
• supported documentation-density prompt modes are documented and validated (#84);
• public repository dotfiles and local-only state receive the intended protection (#90);
• generated documentation links no longer depend on which worktree produced them (#91);
• Git verification failures now provide more actionable explanations (#92);
• /nw-execute is easier to discover for a known single step (#96);
• contributor guidance identifies the generated plugin payload and its canonical sources (#97); and
• a skipped commit no longer counts as completed work (#99).

Security hardening carried forward from 3.22.0 replaces legacy content fingerprints with SHA-256 and removes the vulnerable gitlint toolchain.

Release scope: Graphify ran only inside the release workflow's isolated verification environment; it is not included in the release artifacts or installed for users. No polyglot toolchain was added, and the installed polyglot templates are unchanged from v3.21. This remains a v3 release and does not include the experimental v4 line.

Known limitation: The commit-metadata correction reported in #78 is not complete: some generated metadata may not be recognized as Git trailers. Please continue to track #78 rather than relying on that correction in v3.22.1.

Previous Releases

v3.22.0

The twelve fixes above shipped in nWave v3.22.0.

v3.19

• Per-project activation (opt-in gate) — nWave's globally-installed DES hooks are now opt-in per repository. Unmarked repos stay silent (hooks exit 0); a tracked .nwave/local-config.json marker plus a global