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

• Agent runtime configuration
• CLI reference