ForgePlay & the Cockpit

FlowForge’s discipline could be a lot of commands to remember. Instead it’s a place you sit and a set of guided plays. The cockpit is the terminal home for your work; a ForgePlay is a one-command run of a whole ceremony. This chapter covers both.

The cockpit

Launch it with:

flowforge tui

The cockpit is a full-screen terminal UI — FlowForge’s flagship surface and a deliberate piece of craft. From it you can see and drive the whole workflow:

• Time & tickets — what’s running, what’s assigned, what’s in flight.
• The board — work moving across states, including live workers.
• Dispatch — spawn a worker on a ticket, or launch a play, without leaving the screen.

The cockpit is built on a disciplined design system — a design manual and a spacing canon that travel with every screen — so it reads as one coherent product rather than a pile of panels. Color is never the only signal (every status pairs color with a glyph and a label), palettes are chosen to stay legible for color-vision-deficient users, and NO_COLOR is honored. Good terminal craft is part of the pitch, not an afterthought.

What a ForgePlay is

A ForgePlay is a named, guided run of a FlowForge ceremony — a directed sequence of steps with the founder’s approval gates built in exactly where the plan needs them. You start a play with a plain-language intent and it walks the ceremony for you, stopping at its designed gates and nowhere else.

Plan a Feature

The signature play is Plan a Feature. You describe a feature in ordinary words, and FlowForge runs the full blueprint discipline for you:

requirements → architecture → design → PRD → (you ratify) → decompose → (you review) → attached tickets

• You never write the documents by hand.
• You never drop into a worker to do it.
• You touch exactly two gates: ratify the bundled plan, then review before the tickets are written.
• When the second gate passes, the tickets are emitted automatically — derived from the ratified plan, each carrying its docs trail. There is no separate “create the tickets?” re-ask, because the ratified plan is already the authorization.

Other plays cover other shapes of work — landing a legacy codebase, standing up a landing page — but Plan a Feature is the one that turns an idea into properly-attached, properly-documented work in a single guided loop.

Guided, not automated-away

The plays don’t remove your judgment; they remove the toil around it. The ceremony — the ordering, the artifacts, the gates — runs itself, so your attention goes to the two decisions that actually matter: is the plan right, and are the tickets right.

Why it matters

The cockpit and ForgePlay are where FlowForge’s discipline stops being a list of rules you must remember and becomes a place you work and a button you press. The right way isn’t just enforced — it’s pleasant, which is the only way discipline survives contact with a deadline.