Core workflows

Apothem provides four core capabilities: a shared governance profile, a rules corpus, a structured planning pipeline, and a real-time conformity gate.

The shared profile

Your Apothem profile lives at ~/.config/apothem/profile.yaml unless you pass --profile PATH. It is the single source of truth that every harness adapter derives native config from:

identity:
  name: "Example User"
preferences:
  style: "concise"
rules:
  - "Validate external input before writing files."

Create and inspect the profile:

apothem profile init
apothem profile show --json

First rule

Add shared rules to the profile YAML, then re-materialize the selected harness. When those rules include example data, use fake placeholders so no real identity or credential lands in a shared profile or a CI run.

apothem profile set rules '["Always include a brief summary at the end of every response."]'
apothem update --harness claude-code
apothem verify --harness claude-code

First plan

The /plan pipeline runs inside your harness as slash commands, not through the apothem binary. Once a harness is installed, start a plan from the tool's chat:

/plan-spec

/plan-spec refines your prose into a spec, and /plan-generate materializes a plan suite under <project-root>/.apothem/plans/{suite}/. See the pipeline command reference for the full flow.

Conformity gate

Run from the repository root:

python -m apothem.conformity.gate --all .

Runs all mechanical conformity checks and reports pass/fail per bar.