Skip to content

Jerry Framework

Behavioral guardrails and workflow orchestration for Claude Code. Accrues knowledge, wisdom, experience.

Document Sections

Section Purpose
What is Jerry? Framework overview and core capabilities
Why Jerry? Key reasons to adopt Jerry
Platform Support Supported platforms and status
Quick Start Get up and running in minutes
Known Limitations Current constraints and caveats
Guides Playbooks for each skill
Reference Developer and contributor docs
Available Skills Skill commands with purpose descriptions
License Open source license information

What is Jerry?

Jerry is a Claude Code plugin that provides behavioral guardrails, workflow orchestration, and persistent knowledge management for AI-assisted development sessions. It solves the core problem of Context Rot -- the degradation of LLM performance as context windows fill with 50K-100K+ tokens, causing skipped rules, forgotten instructions, and inconsistent output -- by using the filesystem as infinite memory.

Core Capabilities

  • Behavioral Guardrails -- A 5-layer enforcement system with 24 HARD rules that cannot be overridden, plus MEDIUM and SOFT tiers. Rules auto-load at session start via hooks, get re-injected every prompt (~600 tokens/prompt), and persist through context compaction. Total enforcement budget: ~15,100 tokens (7.6% of 200K context).

  • Workflow Orchestration -- Coordinate multi-phase, multi-agent workflows with persistent state tracking. Fan-out parallel work, synchronize at barriers, and resume across sessions with checkpoint recovery.

  • Knowledge Persistence -- Every skill invocation produces a persisted artifact on disk (research, analysis, decisions, reviews). These survive session boundaries and context compaction, building a cumulative project knowledge base.

  • Quality Enforcement -- A quantitative quality gate (>= 0.92 weighted composite score) with a creator-critic-revision cycle (minimum 3 iterations). Six scoring dimensions (Completeness, Internal Consistency, Methodological Rigor, Evidence Quality, Actionability, Traceability) with calibrated weights ensure deliverables meet a consistent standard before acceptance.

  • Adversarial Review -- Ten adversarial strategies across 4 families (Iterative Self-Correction, Dialectical Synthesis, Role-Based Adversarialism, Structured Decomposition) applied at 4 criticality levels (C1 Routine through C4 Critical tournament review with all 10 strategies).

Why Jerry?

Your context window is not infinite. Once sessions exceed 50K-100K tokens, LLMs begin losing track of earlier instructions — rules get skipped, conventions drift, and output quality degrades silently. Jerry externalizes rules and state to the filesystem and re-injects critical constraints every prompt, so they are enforced reliably regardless of context depth.

Quality should be measurable, not subjective. Jerry scores every deliverable against a six-dimension rubric and enforces a minimum threshold. Below the threshold, work is revised -- not shipped.

Knowledge should accumulate, not evaporate. Every research finding, architecture decision, and analysis result is written to a file. When you return to a project next week or next month, the knowledge is still there.

Complex work needs structure. Multi-phase workflows with parallel agents, quality gates, and cross-session state tracking are first-class citizens in Jerry, not afterthoughts bolted onto a chat interface.

Platform Support

Jerry is primarily developed and tested on macOS. Cross-platform portability is actively being improved.

Platform Status
macOS Primary — fully supported
Linux Expected to work — CI runs on Ubuntu, not primary dev platform
Windows In progress — core functionality works, edge cases may exist

Jerry's CI pipeline tests on macOS, Ubuntu, and Windows. Encountering a platform-specific issue? File a report using the template for your platform:

Early Access Notice: Jerry is under active development. The framework is functional and used in production workflows, but APIs, skill interfaces, and configuration formats may change between releases. See releases for version history. For version pinning, see the Local Clone Install section.

Quick Start

1. Install Jerry

In Claude Code, run two commands:

/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/geekatron/jerry
/plugin install jerry@geekatron-jerry

Verify: /plugin > Installed tab > jerry appears. See the full Installation Guide for scope options, local clone fallback, and troubleshooting.

Install uv to enable Jerry's hooks for session context auto-loading and per-prompt quality enforcement:

curl -LsSf https://astral.sh/uv/install.sh | sh   # macOS/Linux

Restart your terminal. See the Installation Guide for Windows instructions and the full Capability Matrix.

3. Create a Project and Start Working

Set up your first project and invoke a skill:

export JERRY_PROJECT=PROJ-001-my-first-project
mkdir -p projects/PROJ-001-my-first-project/.jerry/data/items

Then follow the Getting Started Runbook for a guided walkthrough from project setup to your first persisted skill output.

Known Limitations

  • Skill and agent definitions are not yet optimized. Current definitions are comprehensive but verbose. Optimization for token efficiency and best-practice alignment is planned for upcoming releases.
  • Windows portability is in progress. Some hooks and scripts may behave differently on Windows. See Platform Support above.

Guides

Guide Description
Getting Started Runbook Step-by-step from installation to first skill invocation
Problem-Solving Playbook Research, analysis, architecture decisions, and 9 specialized agents
Orchestration Playbook Multi-phase workflows with parallel pipelines and quality gates
Transcript Playbook Meeting transcript parsing with domain-specific entity extraction
Plugin Development Developing and distributing Claude Code plugins

Reference

Document Description
CLAUDE.md Guide How Jerry's tiered context loading works and how to modify it
Jerry Constitution Behavioral principles governing all Jerry agents
Installation Guide Full installation and setup instructions
Bootstrap Guide Context distribution setup (developers only)

Available Skills

Skill Command Purpose
Problem-Solving /problem-solving Research, analysis, architecture decisions
Orchestration /orchestration Multi-phase workflow coordination
Work Tracker /worktracker Task and work item management
Transcript /transcript Meeting transcript parsing
NASA SE /nasa-se Systems engineering processes
Architecture /architecture Design decisions and ADRs
Adversary /adversary Adversarial quality reviews and tournament scoring

License

Jerry Framework is open source under the Apache License 2.0.

Quality with soul.