Catalyst Studio — rules, journal and traceability for AI-assisted development
A VS Code extension for projects governed by the catalyst
framework — the agent-installed
layer that gives a codebase one traceable structure for its rules, its
development work, and the history of why every change happened. This
extension makes that structure visible and navigable without leaving
the editor, and gives you a safe way to act on it — every write still
goes through the governing agent, never straight from the UI.
What it does
- Instances — a sidebar tree for every catalyst project open in your
workspace, multi-root aware: each project is a top-level entry, named as
it is, with its artifacts grouped by the types its process module
declares, its rules by document, and its domains. Every entity appears
once; its parents and children are links in its own document. Click any
entry for its full detail — fields, links in both directions, journal —
in a panel; the Journal and the Backlog open from the tree as well.
catalyst's settings open from the view's title bar.
- Search Items — the search button on top of the Instances view (or
Ctrl+Alt+F, Cmd+Alt+F on macOS, while the view has focus; F3 still opens
the view's own find) lists every item of every open project as you type,
each with its status beside its name; type an ID, a name, a status or a
type. The one you choose is selected in the tree and its document opens.
- Close and reopen a bug — right-click a bug in the Instances view:
Close Bug while it is open, Reopen Bug once it is closed. You give a
reason, the editor shows catalyst's preview of the change and runs
catalyst status set only on your yes; if catalyst refuses (a bug's
steps still open, say), its reason is shown and nothing changes. Where
your roles do not grant /status, both are shown greyed out.
- Studio — Catalyst: Open Studio opens the project's dashboard,
inbox, board, journal, trace, rules and approvals in an editor tab.
What waits for a person (an unrecorded change, a reconciliation case,
a version a declared approval gate still needs approved, a proposed
change shown beside the current text) is settled
from there: the editor shows the exact catalyst command and runs it
only on your yes. Approval gates need catalyst 0.80.0 or later,
proposals 0.81.0; each action can be tried first, on a scratch copy,
with catalyst 0.82.0.
- Health board — diagnostics, gutter marks, and CodeLens surface
drift (orphaned artifacts, missing rule targets, dangling references)
directly in the editor, with click-to-jump from a problem in the
Problems panel straight to the file and line it concerns.
- Agent console — run any of the project's own catalyst commands
(
/check-rules, /show-backlog, ...) from the Studio's command palette
through its governing agent, after you confirm, streamed with its cost;
or send an entity straight to an agent chat (Send to Agent (Chat)…),
without a manual copy-paste into an unrelated session.
- Users — a panel of the identity provider's users, roles and groups,
read through catalyst-users (0.10.0 or later), each with a document
listing who holds what. The button on top of the panel, left of its
refresh, logs you in to catalyst-users with a username and password
(catalyst-users 0.9.0 or later) while no one is logged in, and logs you
out, after asking, while someone is.
- No deployment yet? Open a workspace folder that catalyst does not
govern yet and the extension offers to set it up: a new deployment, with
a ready instantiation prompt for your agent. A project whose criterion is
not on this machine yet (a fresh clone) is readied with
catalyst open,
which the extension offers to run.
Every write still goes through catalyst, after your confirmation; the
extension never edits a governed file itself.
Requirements
A project governed by catalyst 0.54.0 or later: a catalyst.toml at its
root, naming its criterion (kept outside the project, in
~/.catalyst/projects/<name>/criterion), and the catalyst command
installed (CATALYST_BIN, ~/.catalyst/bin/catalyst, or catalyst on
the PATH). No project file yet? Open the folder anyway — the extension
offers to help you set it up; see catalyst's own
repository for what that
involves.
Also available for Electron
The same Studio ships as a desktop app for macOS, Windows and Linux,
tracking several projects side by side; its installers are attached to
each catalyst-ui release.
Release notes
See GitHub Releases
for what changed in each version.
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