Apothem documentation

Apothem is a host-agnostic harness configuration manager. You author one shared profile at ~/.config/apothem/profile.yaml, and Apothem materializes it into the native configuration surface of seventeen harnesses — Claude Code, Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot, Codex, Windsurf, Zed, and the rest of the registered catalog.

The unit Apothem syncs is wider than rules alone: rules, slash-commands, skills, hooks, output-styles, settings (with MCP servers), schemas, and docs travel together as one governed corpus, materialized into each harness's native format or an Apothem-owned support subtree where the tool has no matching primitive.

New here? Start in two steps

1. Install — pick an install path (tool-native plugins and extensions, npx, or one-shot scripts) and run the guided first step. Every path needs system Python 3.10 or newer (with click and rich); the npx and extension channels additionally need Node.js 18 or newer.
2. Get to your first working run — author a shared profile, materialize a harness's native configuration from it, and verify the result. About fifteen minutes, end to end.

How Apothem works

• One profile, many native configs. You author intent once; Apothem translates it into each tool's native configuration surface — no lowest-common-denominator flattening. See Host-agnostic posture.
• The operating loop: plan → harden → ship. A planning pipeline (/plan) carries a change through spec, generation, review, and execution; a hardening pipeline (/fortress) drives that work to a release-gated state; the release gate closes the loop. See the command pipeline.
• Work that survives boundaries. Long-running work externalizes its full state to a project-local .apothem/plans/ suite, so a fresh session on any account or machine resumes it in place. See Resumable planning.

Start here

• Install — the install paths (tool-native plugins and extensions, npx, one-shot scripts) and a guided first run.
• Usage — author your profile, install across harnesses, verify, and update.
• Harnesses — the seventeen-harness catalog with each tool's native surface and conversion behavior.
• The command pipeline — the /plan and /research pipeline stages and the audit-review sequence, with the /audit and /fortress orchestrators that wrap them.

Go deeper

• Concepts — the shared profile, harness adapters, and the materialization model.
• Architecture — source layout, the adapter abstraction, the self-contained runtime, and the CI/CD pipeline.
• Reference — the CLI, the profile schema, the rules, skills, commands, hooks, and output-styles catalogs.
• How Apothem compares — an honest, named-peer differentiation matrix.

Governance and security

• Governance — the discipline registry, conformity gate, and release facade.
• Security — the supply-chain posture and the security policy.
• Changelog — release notes, current-version-first.