mudguard
mudguard — autonomous architecture deepening
The headless, autonomous, delta-aware, independently-verified counterpart of the now-interactive architecture skills. mudguard sweeps a codebase — the whole thing or a chosen part — for architecture-deepening opportunities (deep vs shallow modules, the deletion test, seams), verifies every candidate independently, and files the survivors as ready-to-grab vertical-slice issues. Analysis-only. Optionally chain a loop to implement + deploy them (project-specific — see EXTENDING.md).
The engine is interchangeable; the layer is the value. mudguard's durable core is the layer — the inlined methodology, the propose/verify split, delta-awareness, and ADR closure. How you run the loop is a swappable driver: by default mudguard drives the sweep itself via short sub-agents (no external engine); for a literal hands-off loop, pick a driver — ralph (the reference), Claude Code's native /loop, or Codex — see DRIVERS.md.
The methodology comes from Matt Pocock's skills (mattpocock/skills; see the repo README for full credits): the deepening vocabulary (deep vs shallow modules, the deletion test, seams) from codebase-design, the vertical-slice issue format from to-issues, and the scan-and-deepen workflow as the headless analogue of improve-codebase-architecture. Those upstream skills are now interactive and user-invoked, so mudguard inlines the methodology and runs it headlessly rather than calling them.
Provenance & safety
mudguard downloads, installs, and fetches nothing. The GitHub links here are attribution, not install sources. The default path drives the sweep via sub-agents and runs no external script at all. Loop drivers (ralph, /loop, Codex) are separate tools you install and audit yourself; mudguard only ever invokes a driver's runner (e.g. ralph-claude-code/ralph_loop.sh) when it is already present in your own repo, on the opt-in hands-off path (see DRIVERS.md). Any tooling copy (e.g. cp -R <repo>/ralph-claude-code …) is a local file copy — nothing is pulled from the network.