Canopus — AI skill for Claude Code
Canopus keeps long-running AI coding agents locked on their goal: frozen acceptance envelopes, deterministic circuit breakers for drift and loops, durable task state, and a Claude Code Stop-hook foote.
How to install Canopus
This entry records only its repository, not the path inside it, so there is no
exact command to give. Open Hsiang-Tang/canopus and copy the folder into
~/.claude/skills/, or the file into ~/.claude/agents/.
What Canopus does
Canopus keeps long-running AI coding agents locked on their goal: frozen acceptance envelopes, deterministic circuit breakers for drift and loops, durable task state, and a Claude Code Stop-hook footer latch. Stdlib-only, adoptable in 15 minutes.
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README
Canopus — keep long-running AI agents locked on their goal
Spacecraft on multi-year missions used a *Canopus star tracker* to lock onto one bright star and hold their orientation. **Canopus** does the same for AI coding agents such as Claude Code and Codex: a small, complete framework for running them with engineering discipline. It turns an ambiguous request into a frozen, acceptance-checkable goal; lets replaceable agents push that goal forward across sessions, engines, and machines; and **stops them deterministically when they drift, loop, or over-engineer** — while every project's data stays in its own repository.
It is plain standard-library Python and Markdown that you can adopt in about 15 minutes.
[`docs/EVIDENCE.md`](docs/EVIDENCE.md) maps every behavior to the test that proves it.
Why it exists
AI agents are productive inside one chat and unreliable across many. The failures are predictable:
| Failure | What Canopus does instead |
|---|---|
| Chat becomes the database; a new session forgets what was accepted | Task state lives in the task's Issue and Task Footer; every session resumes from it |
| Commits, tests, and reviews look like progress | Only closed acceptance items and resolved blockers count as progress |
| Every "reasonable" finding grows the scope | The envelope is frozen; out-of-scope findings are deferred, widening needs re-admission |
| Review/fix loops never end | Finite allowances that never replenish, and a circuit breaker on stagnati |
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