henkaten-council

A Claude Code plugin that adds a continuous-improvement governance layer on top of any project managed by the trine-eval harness. The council detects change points (henkaten), audits autonomous decisions, manages a dynamic autonomy floor, and enforces the andon protocol across sprints.

> A note on the name. henka (変化) means "change"; henkaten (変化点) is > the specific Toyota Production System term for a "change point" — the concept > this plugin is built around. The repo got the shorter henka-council for URL > brevity, but the plugin identifier, the skill namespace > (/henkaten-council:...), and every in-code reference use the full > henkaten-council. The contraction is deliberate and documented in > docs/phase-0-proposal.md. Internally the > plugin also distinguishes henkaten (変化点 — passive, emerged) from > henkoten (変更点 — active, deliberately initiated) on every change-point > record, but uses "henkaten" as the umbrella name.

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What it Does

The henkaten-council plugin wires a council of specialized agents into the Claude Code skill system. Each sprint, the council:

1. Detects change points using 4M axis classification (Man/Machine/Method/Material) 2. Audits every correction with evidence citations and reversibility flags 3. Manages a dynamic autonomy floor that drops on consecutive sprint failures or repeated andon stops from multiple distinct originators 4. Delegates sprint evaluation to the trine-eval harness via

/trine-eval:harness-sprint 5. Records all governance activity to append-only JSONL logs under .council/

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Prerequisites

Claude Code ≥ 0.3.0
trine-eval ≥ 0.3.0 installed and initialized in your target project

(run /trine-eval:harness-kickoff first if the .harness/ directory does not yet exist)

Git ≥ 2.30

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Install

Option A — Marketplace (Recommended)

This repository ships its own single-plugin marketplace manifest (.claude-plugin/marketplace.json). In Claude Code, add the repo as a marketplace, then install the plugin from it:

/plugin marketplace add ats-kinoshita-iso/henka-council
/plugin install henkaten-council@henkaten-council

Claude Code will fetch the plugin, auto-discover the skills and agents under skills/ and agents/, auto-register the hooks declared in

hooks/hooks.json, and load CLAUDE.md automatically for all future sessions in the project.

Option B — Direct Path Install

Clone this repository and add it as a local marketplace:

git clone https://github.com/ats-kinoshita-iso/henka-council.git
/plugin marketplace add ./henka-council
/plugin install henkaten-council@henkaten-council

After installation, verify the plugin is active:

/plugin list

You should see henkaten-council in the output with status active.

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Hook Installation and Self-Check

The council's enforcement hooks must be registered with Claude Code's hook system before the council can prevent append-only log overwrites or enforce the reversibility policy. The hooks live in hooks/ (Bash, for Linux/macOS) and hooks/win/ (PowerShell, for Windows).

> As of v0.1.2: hooks auto-register from hooks/hooks.json when the > plugin is installed via the marketplace flow (Option A above). The kickoff > skill's Step 1d.0 detects this case and the manual snippet below is then > only a fallback — needed for direct-path installs on Claude Code builds > that don't read plugin-level hooks.json, or for pure-PowerShell Windows > hosts without bash.

When you run /henkaten-council:council-kickoff for the first time, the skill performs a hook installation self-check and refuses to proceed past Step 1d if neither auto-registration nor manual registration covers all four required hooks.

The full registration snippet is in skills/council-kickoff/SKILL.md under Step 1d.1 (Linux/macOS) and Step 1d.2 (Windows). The short version:

Add this hooks block to your target project's .claude/settings.local.json:

"hooks": {
  "PreToolUse": [
    { "matcher": "Write|Edit",
      "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
                  "command": "bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/enforce-append-only.sh" }] },
    { "matcher": "Bash",
      "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
                  "command": "bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/enforce-reversibility.sh" }] }
  ],
  "PostToolUse": [
    { "matcher": "*",
      "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
                  "command": "bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/log-tool-call.sh" }] }
  ],
  "Stop": [
    { "hooks": [{ "type": "command",
                  "command": "bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/session-stopped-marker.sh" }] }
  ]
}

On Windows targets, substitute pwsh -NoLogo -NoProfile -File ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/win/<name>.ps1 for each bash ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/hooks/<name>.sh. The PowerShell hooks ship functional parity with the bash siblings (v2.1 amendment A7).

${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT} is resolved by Claude Code at hook-fire time to the plugin's installed directory. If your Claude Code build does not resolve that variable yet, substitute the absolute path to where the plugin is installed (e.g. /home/<user>/.claude/plugins/cache/henkaten-council/<version>/).

Do not skip the hook self-check. Running the council without the append-only hook means JSONL logs can be silently overwritten, which breaks the governance audit chain.

Permissions for running council-kickoff against a target project

The kickoff skill writes into the target project's .council/ directory and may merge a governance block into the target's .harness/config.json. Depending on your Claude Code permission tier, you may need to add Bash permissions for the target project's path (e.g.

Bash(mkdir -p /path/to/target/.council/**)) before the orchestrator can create the baseline. The council-kickoff skill will surface this requirement if it hits a denial.

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Quickstart

Step 1 — Initialize the trine-eval harness (if not already done)

/trine-eval:harness-kickoff

This creates .harness/spec.md, .harness/features.json, and

.harness/sprints.json in your project.

Step 2 — Bootstrap the council governance baseline

/henkaten-council:council-kickoff

This creates the complete .council/ directory structure:

.council/
  config.json
  council-manifest.json
  henka-register.jsonl
  decision-log.jsonl
  audit-log.jsonl
  standard-work.json
  state/
    effective-autonomy.json
  proposed/
  proposed/archive/
  course-corrections/
  retrospectives/
  sessions/

The kickoff skill also:

Writes a governance signal to .harness/config.json
Verifies that all required hooks are installed (hook self-check)
Surfaces the one-time git merge opt-in setup note (see below)

Step 3 — Run the council autorun loop (Sprint 4+)

Once the council baseline is in place, run:

/henkaten-council:council-autorun

to start the sprint review loop (available from Sprint 4 onward).

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Git Merge Opt-In

By default, git merge is in the deny tier in .claude/settings.json. This means the Orchestrator cannot propose or execute merges without explicit user override. If you want the Orchestrator to propose merges when a sprint PASSes, move git merge * from the deny array to the ask array in

.claude/settings.json. The council-kickoff skill will remind you of this one-time setup step.

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Dependency: trine-eval

The henkaten-council plugin depends on trine-eval as its harness. The governance signal written to .harness/config.json by the kickoff skill tells trine-eval that the council is active. Sprint evaluation is always delegated to

/trine-eval:harness-sprint — the council does not implement its own evaluation engine.

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License

MIT - see LICENSE.

henkaten-council

Summary

Install to Claude Code