Chief

Chief is an open source command line tool that builds large software projects by running a coding agent in a loop. The developer describes a project as a series of tasks, and Chief works through them one at a time, running the agent until each task is done and making one commit per task. Each iteration starts with a fresh context window while progress persists between runs, a pattern the author credits to the Ralph Wiggum loop, so an agent can work through a big project without hitting context limits. It is for developers who already use a command line coding agent and want to hand it longer, unattended work. Claude Code is the default, and Codex CLI, OpenCode, Cursor CLI and Gemini CLI can be selected through a config file, a command flag or an environment variable. Chief ships as a single binary with no runtime dependencies for macOS, Linux and Windows. All state lives in a project folder that is easy to exclude from version control, it can run locally or over SSH on a remote server, and a terminal interface shows real time progress, live logs and keyboard controls. Chief is free and released under the MIT licence. It installs through Homebrew or an install script from the GitHub repository. There is no paid tier; the real cost is the usage of whichever coding agent it drives, billed by that agent's provider. Because Chief only orchestrates, output quality depends on the underlying agent and on how well the project is broken into tasks. The one commit per task approach keeps the history reviewable instead of producing one large diff.