Fagan MCP server

Fagan

Spend tokens on judgment, not typing.

Frontier models cost money per token and are excellent at judgment. Local models run free and are adequate at typing. This pipeline splits software engineering along exactly that line: a frontier model decomposes the work, plans it, reviews the diff, and adjudicates anything risky — while a local model writes the implementation at no marginal cost.

What makes the cheap half trustworthy is inspection. In Michael Fagan's 1976 IBM study, formal inspection found 82% of the defects in the released product — 38 per KLOC, against 8 per KLOC for unit testing. Quality lives in the gate, not in the author. So this project spends its budget on gates: TDD enforced before implementation, an independent review pass, acceptance-oracle grading, a risk-tiered overlord that stops for a human on anything irreversible, and a merge gate that re-runs the suite against the rebased branch before anything lands.

The goal is narrow and specific: enterprise-grade engineering discipline — decomposition, TDD, code review, dependency-ordered delivery — on a $20/month budget.

For detailed reference material, see REFERENCE.md.

Before you start: read Reliability & limitations below. This is an autonomous coding pipeline with real, documented failure modes — it is not a hands-off "describe a feature, get a PR" tool yet.

Platform support

Developed and run day-to-day on macOS. The core (MCP server, dashboard, Claude-backend dispatch/review, the full test suite) is plain Python and CI tests it on Ubuntu across Python 3.12–3.14 on every push. Two pieces are macOS-only:

packaged as launchd jobs on macOS. On Linux, render the systemd equivalent with scripts/generatesystemdunits.sh (see Scheduler below) instead of hand-rolling init files, or run the entry points directly in a foreground terminal/tmux session.

• launchd/.plist** — the scheduler/MLX-supervisor/usage-poller are

works fine on Linux via Ollama or LM Studio instead (PIPELINELOCALPROVIDER=ollama / lmstudio).

• MLX (PIPELINELOCALPROVIDER=mlx) — Apple Silicon only. Local dispatch

Windows is untested.

Quickstart

One-line install

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/motock/fagan/master/scripts/remote-install.sh | bash

This clones the repo to ~/.fagan (override the location with FAGANINSTALLDIR, and the source URL with FAGANREPOURL) and runs scripts/install.sh inside it -- equivalent to the manual clone-and-run steps below, minus the typing. Re-running it later updates the existing checkout (git pull --ff-only) instead of re-cloning.

Piping a remote script into bash means trusting whatever that URL serves at fetch time. If you'd rather read it first:

curl -fsSL https://raw.githubusercontent.com/motock/fagan/master/scripts/remote-install.sh -o remote-install.sh
less remote-install.sh   # or open it in an editor
bash remote-install.sh

Either way, cd into the install directory it reports (~/.fagan by default) and continue from step 2 below. Prefer a manual clone? Use the steps below instead.

Shortened. The full README is on GitHub.