nWave 🤖 Agent Open source

What it does

nWave is a structured delivery workflow that runs inside Claude Code. It splits feature work into seven waves: discover, diverge, discuss, design, devops, distill and deliver. Each wave has its own agents and produces documents you review and approve before the next wave begins, so the agent never runs unsupervised from idea to merged code. Delivery is test-driven: acceptance tests are written in the distill wave and the software-crafter agent implements against them. A hook layer called DES checks that delivery steps follow the required test phases and blocks stray source edits during an active delivery.

What is inside

• Wave commands such as /nw-discover, /nw-discuss, /nw-design, /nw-distill and /nw-deliver, plus /nw-buddy, which reads your project and suggests where to start
• Wave agents, cross-wave specialists, peer reviewers and business-analysis agents
• /nw-rigor profiles, from lean to exhaustive, that set which models write and review code and whether mutation testing runs
• The nwave-ai CLI for install, uninstall, diagnostics, per-project activation and a feature-delta validator
• Documentation at docs.nwave.ai with tutorials, a team rollout guide and offline install steps

Works with

Claude Code is the main host. The README says OpenCode and Codex CLI are supported through separate install guides, and that DES enforcement works with Codex hooks. A plugin-marketplace install exists but lacks the enforcement hooks.

How to install

It needs Python 3.10 or newer.

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

Then restart Claude Code and run /nw-buddy What should I do next?.

Maintenance and safety

nWave is MIT-licensed with regular maintenance releases and published changelogs. The installer runs a script from the project's own GitHub repo; the installation guide covers manual uv or pipx steps. It writes agents, commands and hooks into ~/.claude, and hooks are opt-in per repository. It checks for updates at session start, which can be turned off, and the project says it collects no user data.

Who should use it

Teams and solo developers who want a disciplined, gated process with written requirements, architecture and acceptance tests before code. For quick fixes it is heavy, although you can jump straight to the distill and deliver waves.