Agent orchestration

Coordinating multiple AI coding agents through a structured workflow — assigning work, sequencing stages, isolating their changes and reviewing output — rather than running them ad hoc. defract's core: competitors run your agents; defract runs your process.

Lifecycle

defract's gated pipeline that carries a story from idea to shipped: story / scope → design → architecture → implementation → review → release. Each stage is approvable; nothing skips ahead silently.

Parallel agents

Multiple Claude Code agents working at the same time on different stories. The hard part isn't running more of them — it's coordinating and trusting what comes back. See running parallel Claude Code agents.

Git worktree isolation

Each story runs in its own git worktree — a separate working directory on its own branch — so parallel agents and people never overwrite each other on main. Parallel work is isolated by default.

Agent-reviewed merge

Code is reviewed by agents before it merges. Humans approve scope, design and architecture and then see the working feature — you stay above the diff, not buried in it.

Visual design stage

A built-in stage where a feature's design is produced and approved before any code is written — uncommon among agent runners, and a core part of why defract produces less slop.

Memory

A system that learns your codebase and conventions across builds, so agents carry context forward instead of starting cold each task. See keeping context across parallel agents.

Local-first

Your work and PTY transcripts stay on your device. Nothing about your code is sent to defract's servers. See local-first AI coding.

PTY transcript

The pseudo-terminal session log of an agent's run — the full record of what it did. In defract these never leave the device.

Own-Claude economics

You bring your own Claude and pay Anthropic directly for model usage. defract orchestrates the work; it doesn't resell tokens.

Human-in-the-loop

A mode where agents pause at every stage and hand control to you — for high-blast-radius work where you want the wheel at each step.

Scope / story

The unit of work in defract. You approve the scope of a story up front; the lifecycle then carries it to shipped.