Overview
dev-playbook holds your team’s coding standards and serves them to coding agents over MCP: guardrails, a definition of done, per-language rules, and a workflow for each kind of task. The agent reads them before it writes, not after review.
If a repo has no standards yet, dev-playbook generates a full set from template packs. That is the case most teams are actually in.
The shape of it
Section titled “The shape of it”There are three pieces, and you can use one without the others.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| The MCP server | Five playbook_* tools over stdio or SSE. This is the part agents talk to. |
| The Claude Code plugin | The server, two skills and two hooks, installed with two commands. No port, no token. |
| The dashboard | A browser UI for authoring standards and reading telemetry. Only exists when you run the server over HTTP. |
Standards live in SQLite. The MCP tools and the dashboard read the same store, so a document edited in the browser is the document the agent reads on its next call.
Where to start
Section titled “Where to start”- Using Claude Code? Install the plugin. It is two commands and needs no infrastructure.
- Using Cursor or Windsurf? They have no plugin system, so use the manual MCP setup.
- Want to see the flow first? Your first task walks one change from start to finish.
- Repo has no standards? Template packs explains what gets generated,
and
playbook_scaffold_standardsis the tool that does it.
What it does not do
Section titled “What it does not do”It does not review your code, run your tests, or gate your pull requests. It puts the rules where the agent will read them and records which ones get read. Enforcement exists, is limited to blocking edits in a repo with no standards at all, and is off by default.