parley-deck-cli
> Real multi-agent deliberation with a durable, reviewable audit trail — not
> three agents in three terminals, and not one model role-playing a committee.
parley runs Parley Deck: a transport-agnostic protocol for getting several
AI agents to genuinely cooperate on a hard change — plus the CLI that makes it
usable instead of just specified. Each agent writes its own analysis, they
cross-review, reach a recorded consensus, implement, and review the
implementation — every step a file you can read, diff, and resume.
Why not just spawn three agents in three terminals? Ad-hoc multi-agent gives
you no audit trail, no conflict discipline, no consensus step, and no way to
resume. Parley Deck ships those as protocol.
Why not ask one model to play a committee? That's solo reasoning in a costume —
there's no second voice to actually disagree, and it reintroduces the single-model
self-preference that quorum-gated review exists to defeat. Parley Deck is non-solo
by design.
What you get
- An 8-phase idea lifecycle (§4) — kickoff → independent analysis → cross-review
→ consensus →
FINAL.md → IMPLEMENTATION.md → code review → fix-up.
Append-only, and resumable from the documents alone.
- Non-solo by design (§1) — stable agent IDs (§2), one file per agent per round
(§6); no agent overwrites another.
- Compare, don't merge — the consensus "Comparison & blind spots" lens rates
confidence by agreement and surfaces contradictions and blind spots instead of
averaging them away.
- Transport-agnostic (§0, §11) —
local-dir, github-pr, or gitlab-mr: the
same protocol whether agents share a filesystem or review each other through a PR.
- Vendor/model-agnostic roster — Claude, Codex, Gemini, GLM, and more by stable
ID (subject to the CLIs you have installed and authorized).
- Readiness preflight (§9.0,
parley preflight) — protocol-freshness plus a
live roster ping before an idea starts; any exclusion is user-confirmed.
- Advisory retrospectives (§13,
parley retro) — a quorum-gated pass over the
deck's own history that proposes improvements through the normal workflow,
never applies them automatically.
- Supervised automation — a live TUI and an auto-drive driver advance protocol
phases; agent supervision (watchdog, stall guard, validated-artifact-beats-
nonzero-exit) catches hung agents; code implementation and side effects stay gated.
Inspired by — adopted & adapted
Parley Deck didn't invent these ideas; it wired them into one repository-backed,
quorum-gated protocol:
- OpenRouter Fusion → the compare-not-merge consensus lens
(confidence-by-agreement, blind-spots), applied to asynchronous multi-round
markdown instead of a real-time API ensemble.
- OpenAI ExecPlans / PLANS.md → resume-from-the-doc state, split into a static
FINAL.md and a living IMPLEMENTATION.md governed by review-consensus.
- RHO (Retrospective Harness Optimization) → §13 retro, but advisory-only and
quorum-gated instead of single-model self-preference.
- kindly → strict gates, stopping judgment, no-suppression review dispositions,
and artifact-wins supervision.
- Preflight readiness → §9.0 protocol-freshness and roster liveness before each idea.
Reference to these projects is for attribution and lineage only; no endorsement,
sponsorship, or affiliation is implied.
Install
Install the current checkout into ~/.parley-deck while developing:
cd /path/to/parley-deck-cli
scripts/install-local.sh
The binary is installed as:
~/.parley-deck/bin/parley
Add it to your shell path if needed:
export PATH="$HOME/.parley-deck/bin:$PATH"
Verify:
parley version
parley version --all
parley help
The release version follows semantic versioning and is recorded in VERSION. parley version --all also reports parley-deck-skill installer, runtime skill, and project metadata status when the skill installer is available.
Re-run scripts/install-local.sh after pulling or building new changes to replace the installed binary with the latest local version.
Options:
scripts/install-local.sh --dry-run
scripts/install-local.sh --prefix /tmp/parley-test
scripts/install-local.sh --bin-dir "$HOME/bin"
Homebrew users can install or update from the tap:
brew update
brew install feci/parley/parley-deck-cli
brew upgrade feci/parley/parley-deck-cli
Using Parley Deck
Initialize a repository:
parley init --dir .
Inspect and verify available agents:
parley agents list --dir .
parley agents verify --dir . --agent claude
parley agents verify --dir . --full --agent codex --yes
Start a multi-agent round:
parley run --dir . --participants claude,agy --yes "Plan the next CLI slice"
Run without opening the live TUI:
parley run --dir . --no-tui --participants claude,agy --yes "Review the repo-map MVP"
Resume or inspect work:
parley status --dir .
parley status --dir . --idea repo-map-mvp
parley continue --dir . 20260517T120000.000000000Z
parley resume --dir . 20260517T120000.000000000Z
continue prints the planner-derived next safe workflow action for an existing
run or idea. resume remains the read-only detail/live-view command.
Answer a human-in-the-loop question:
parley answer --dir . 20260517T120000.000000000Z q1 "Use the conservative default"
Generate repository context for prompts or tools:
parley context repo-map --dir . --format markdown --max-files 50
parley context repo-map --dir . --format json --max-files 10
Manage consensus:
parley consensus status --dir . repo-map-mvp
parley consensus draft --dir . --round 1 --by codex repo-map-mvp
parley consensus request-signoffs --dir . --participants claude,agy --yes repo-map-mvp
parley consensus signoff --dir . --agent codex --status accept --notes "Ready" repo-map-mvp
Open the TUI:
parley tui --dir .
For the full command and flag reference:
parley help
Documentation