Walden Documentation

Walden is a spec-driven delivery kernel: a deterministic CLI that takes a feature from intention to certified release through reviewed documents, executable proofs, and durable evidence. These pages are the reference for the mechanism, organized by what you are trying to do.

Learn

• Quickstart — one real feature from repo init to a releasable verdict, in ten minutes.
• The Agentic Flow — how most teams actually run Walden: the skill authors, the CLI enforces, you keep the judgment calls.

Understand

• The Spec Lifecycle — the whole mechanism, end to end: how a feature is born, sealed, chained, executed, proven, and certified. Start here to understand why the commands do what they do.
• Product Boundaries — what the open-source kernel includes, what belongs to the orchestration layer above it, and where the line is.

Operate

• The Daily Workflow — the command loop for authoring, approving, executing, reconciling, and certifying, phase by phase.
• Brownfield Adoption — bringing a repository with existing specs into the current contract: walden adopt, triaging the partition, and retiring superseded eras.
• CI Integration — the generated validation workflow, evidence in pipelines, and gating releases on the certification verdict.

Reference

• CLI Commands — every command: synopsis, flags, behavior, exit codes.
• JSON Contract — the versioned envelope, per-command result fields, the three evidence surfaces, and the additivity policy.
• Spec File Format — the .walden/ layout, document frontmatter, EARS criteria, the task and proof grammar, and every convention file.

Project

• Roadmap — current release, near-term work, and the enterprise layer.

Reading paths

• Evaluating Walden? Quickstart, then The Agentic Flow, then The Spec Lifecycle.
• Working with a coding agent? The Agentic Flow — one skill install, and the ceremony costs the agent, not you.
• Adopting it on an existing repository? The Spec Lifecycle, then Brownfield Adoption.
• Using it every day? The Daily Workflow with CLI Commands at hand.
• Building tooling on top? JSON Contract, then Spec File Format.

Documentation describes the released version whose tag matches this checkout. Version history lives in the CHANGELOG; agent-facing operational instructions live in the embedded skill (walden skill show), which is distributed with the binary and intentionally self-contained.