Quickstart
This walks you from a cold install to dispatching your first parallel multi-agent run. Assumes you already have the Claude Code CLI installed.
1. Install the plugin¶
Start a new Claude Code session in any repo. Type /orc: and tab-complete — you should see seven commands.
2. Recap (or skip on first run)¶
On a fresh repo this is a no-op. In an established orc-using repo, it reads .orc/state.json, the backlog, and recent commits, and tells you exactly where the last session left off.
3. Capture an idea¶
Mid-conversation, when something occurs to you that you don't want to lose:
orc snapshots the current conversation context (relevant files, why-now reasoning, suggested first step) into .orc/backlog/NNN-*.md. Survives across sessions.
4. Scope a backlog item into a plan¶
Reads the backlog entry, explores the relevant code, asks 1–2 clarifying questions if needed, and emits a scoped plan file with concrete tasks, file paths, and an executor recommendation per task (Claude / Codex / Cursor).
5. Dispatch in parallel¶
Picks up the latest scoped plan, decomposes it into dependency-ordered waves, dispatches each wave's tasks in parallel to the chosen executors, polls for completion, reviews diffs, and advances. State persists to .orc/state.json so a crash or /clear doesn't lose progress.
6. (Optional) Hill-climb a metric¶
For tasks framed as "improve metric X":
Runs the Karpathy autoresearch loop: observe misses, hypothesize a fix, dispatch the edit, evaluate against the locked metric, keep or revert via git. Stops on plateau.
7. Handoff before ending¶
Persists state to disk with a human-readable summary. Next session's /orc:recap will pick it up.
What to read next¶
- Architecture — how wave dispatch and executor routing actually work under the hood.
- Commands — full reference for every flag and argument.