Athenode

Athenode documentation

Athenode runs on your machine and gives your AI coding agents three things: a specification tree that says what gets built, plugins that teach each AI coding tool how to work, and an SSH gateway through which agents work on your servers with your approval. You install it as one npm package, open its web UI in the browser and run its skills from your AI tool.

An AI coding agent is good at implementing a well-defined task and bad at guessing what you meant. In Athenode you first write down what should be built, as specifications, and your agent then builds it from them. The guide to spec-driven development (SDD) explains the method itself.

The parts of Athenode

Part What you do with it Where it runs
The athenode package Install the athenode daemon, its web UI and the Athenode CLI with npm i -g athenode Your machine
The athenode daemon and its web UI Keep your projects, read and edit specifications, keep ToDo cards, edit plugins, browse the plugin library and manage SSH connections, at http://127.0.0.1:3717 Your machine
The Athenode CLI Bind a repository to a project with athenode init, bring the installed plugin up to date with athenode sync, run the daemon as a service, back it up Your terminal
The plugin in your AI tool Run the skills that shape, break down and implement specifications Your repository
The Athenode MCP server Let your AI agent read and change the project from your AI tool The daemon or an Athenode Pro server
The SSH gateway Let your agent run commands, jobs, file transfers and health checks on your SSH hosts, each action approved by you or by a rule you set The daemon or an Athenode Pro server
Athenode Pro Share projects with a team, with accounts, project roles and single sign-on A server your team runs
Your Athenode account Publish plugins to the library, and buy and manage Athenode Pro for an organisation Athenode's web app at platform.athenode.com

The athenode daemon is the local Athenode server that the athenode package installs: it keeps your projects on your machine and serves the web UI and the Athenode MCP server at http://127.0.0.1:3717. The local athenode daemon needs no sign-in. Install Athenode sets it up, and the web UI describes how its pages are laid out.

A project holds one specification tree, its ToDo cards, its plugins and its SSH connections. athenode init binds a repository to one project, and your AI agent then works in that project. Core concepts explains how the objects of a project fit together.

The specification tree

A specification is one described piece of work, with a title, a summary, Markdown content, a status and its own questions and answers. The specification tree is the hierarchy of a project's specifications. Any specification can have sub-specifications, to any depth.

A tree describes a product from the whole application down to a change an agent finishes in one go. A web shop can have a specification "Checkout flow" with the sub-specifications "Cart", "Payment" and "Shipping". "Payment" is broken down again when it turns out to be larger than one change. A leaf specification is a specification with no sub-specifications. Leaves are what an AI agent implements.

Specifications describes statuses, blockers, questions and answers, the implementation plan and search.

Plugins and your AI tools

A plugin is a named bundle of what your AI coding tools work with: skills, agents, rules, MCP servers and plugin files. Every project starts with its own copy of the standard Athenode plugin, which holds the Athenode workflow. You can edit that copy, create plugins of your own and add plugins from the plugin library, the shared catalogue of plugins that projects have published.

athenode init installs a plugin in the format each AI tool reads, for any of the 30 supported AI tools. After you change the plugin, athenode sync brings the files in your repository up to date. Plugins explains what a plugin contains, and the plugin library how to add one.

The workflow from idea to code

The standard plugin gives your AI tool nine skills. A skill is a reusable set of instructions that an AI tool loads when it is relevant, usually run as a slash command such as /atn:mindmap. These four take a project from its workflow settings to code.

  1. /atn:settings records your workflow settings once per project: how the skills test, review and use git.
  2. /atn:mindmap starts a mind map, a session in which your AI agent asks rounds of questions and turns your answers into a specification. It ends with the specification in the status Prepared.
  3. /atn:decompose decomposes a specification, which means breaking it down into one level of stages, each a sub-specification of its own. A small change needs no decomposition.
  4. /atn:apply applies a specification. Your AI agent plans and implements each leaf under it, in the order the blockers allow, with tests, review and git handled as your workflow settings say. A blocker is a dependency between two specifications: a specification that is blocked by another is implemented after it.

The web UI shows each specification, question and status change while the agent works, and you can answer the agent's questions there or in your AI tool. What the agent notices outside the specification becomes a ToDo card, a short note of work to do later: a follow-up, tech debt, a bug or an idea. The Athenode workflow covers every skill, what it needs and what it produces.

The Free plan and Athenode Pro

The Free plan is the athenode package: the daemon, the web UI, the CLI and the SSH gateway on your machine, for one person, under the Apache-2.0 licence. It needs no account.

Athenode Pro is the Athenode server a team runs itself, with accounts, project roles and a licence. Each member binds a repository to a Pro project with athenode init --server <url>, and the team works in the same specification tree and plugins. An organisation in your Athenode account buys Pro in one of three tiers, Pro Solo, Pro Team or Pro Enterprise, and every enabled account on the Pro server takes one seat. Athenode Pro describes what Pro adds, and Pro tiers the tiers.

Your Athenode account is needed to publish a plugin to the library, to like or report library entries, and to buy and manage Athenode Pro. Accounts on a Pro server are separate from Athenode accounts. Your Athenode account covers sign-up and the account settings.

Athenode keeps your specifications with their questions, answers, plans and statuses, your ToDo cards and your plugins. It does not keep your code, the changes an agent made, or which AI tool did the work. What Athenode stores states this in full.

Where to start in the Athenode documentation