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Agentic Software Engineering

Boost your daily productivity while
keeping yourself in the driver's seat!
Fuse Agentic AI Coding with
traditional Software Engineering!
Let the agent handle the chores while
you stay in control of the craft!
Various operation modes provided —
you choose the best for the job!

Agentic Software Engineering (ASE) is the opinionated Open Source toolkit of renowned and prolific author Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall, for fusing the concepts of Agentic AI Coding and traditional Software Engineering. ASE ships as a plugin for the software development tool Anthropic Claude Code CLI — and with reduced support also for the alternative tools GitHub Copilot CLI and OpenAI Codex CLI. It comprises agent hooks, parametrizable agent skills, an underlying Model-Context-Protocol (MCP) service, and a companion Command-Line Interface (CLI).

Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall in a
studio interview on ASE

ASE incorporates reasonable methodology and automation aspects to support the daily, recurring tasks of a Software Developer and Software Architect. The comprehensive functionality spans from brainstorming ideas, searching the Web, asking foreign LLMs, discovering components, through evaluating alternatives, challenging statements, analyzing root causes, managing tasks, grilling task plans, all the way to analyzing, fixing, refactoring, and crafting code, reviewing changesets, and many more.

Claude Code:
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Testimonials from Practitioners

How ASE holds up in the daily work of the Software Developers and Software Architects who fold it into their own engineering practice — in their own words.

ASE keeps me in the driver's seat while the agent does the chores.

— Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall

Thanks to Agentic AI Coding, developing software is fun again. ASE is a great added bonus here!

— Matthias Brusdeylins

After 40 years of traditional software development, ASE finally allowed me to make peace with today's Agentic AI Coding era.

— Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall

Finally, I get to work with a professional again. ASE is that long-awaited professional.

— Jochen Hörtreiter

I put all my methodology know-how and experience into ASE. Now it's your turn to leverage from it.

— Dr. Ralf S. Engelschall

I use ASE in GitHub Copilot CLI and here especially the various non-coding skills. They work great, even for consulting tasks!

— Zoltan Ruzman

ASE is the Swiss Army knife for my daily tasks performed in Claude Code!

— Maximilian Marsch

Check Your Fit

ASE is deliberately opinionated, so it fits some people well and others not at all. Rather than letting you find that out after wasting your time, here it is up-front — read both columns and decide before you go any further.

ASE is for YOU, if …

  • You want to stay in the driver's seat

    You decide and trigger the next operation, and you review what came back. ASE hands you the wheel — it does not take it.

  • You are an experienced developer or architect

    You can tell a good result from a plausible one. ASE raises the ceiling of what you produce; it does not raise the floor of what you know.

  • You prefer thinking before acting

    You accept an approach funnel and a written plan before the first line changes, because post-hoc repair of a wrong change set costs more than the detour.

  • You have to defend your decisions

    Component picks, architecture calls, and refactorings get challenged sooner or later. ASE hands you weighted decision matrices, an Advocatus Diaboli, and a Steelman — so you arrive with reasoning instead of a hunch.

  • You like the Unix command-line style

    ASE skills are explicit commands with Unix-style options, like /ase-code-craft --next IMPLEMENT — not a chat you nudge until it complies.

  • You run Claude Code CLI with a strong LLM

    ASE is primarily developed against Anthropic Claude Code CLI plus Claude Opus or Claude Fable, and needs that class of instruction-following.

ASE is not for YOU, if …

  • You want plain Vibe Coding

    If "prompt it, ship it, never read it" is your goal, ASE only adds ceremony you will route around anyway.

  • You want a fully autonomous agent fleet

    ASE deliberately keeps a human in the loop at every decision point. It, by default, is not an unattended, self-dispatching swarm, even if it can be forced into it to some extent.

  • You do consulting or management

    ASE primarily targets the recurring tasks of Software Engineering and Software Architecture, although various skills are also useful outside this scope.

  • You optimize for the smallest token bill

    Methodology costs tokens: a preloaded constitution, on-demand meta descriptions, approach funnels, and plans. Even if the persona setting can trim the output tokens, stringency has its price.

  • You want an unopinionated framework

    ASE ships strict artifact formats, fixed skill families, and built-in tenets. You can configure it to some extent, but you cannot make it neutral.

  • You are on weak LLM or non-mainstream harness

    ASE leans on elaborate control constructs and XML placeholders. Weaker models and non-mainstream harnesses follow them only partially.

Notice: The right column is a consequence of the ASE design, not a defect of it — every one of those boundaries buys something in the left column.

npm install -g @rse/ase && ase setup install