CascadingDev (CDev) - Simplified

CDev — short for Cascading Development — is a Git-native AI–human collaboration framework that uses git hooks and cascading rules to enhance your development workflow.

This is the simplified version focused on core functionality:

• Git pre-commit hooks with safety checks
• Cascading .ai-rules.yml system
• Ramble GUI for capturing structured feature requests

For advanced discussion orchestration features, see Orchestrated Discussions.

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Key Features

• Cascading Rules System — nearest .ai-rules.yml defines behavior at each directory level
• Pre-commit Hook — secret scanning, discussion summary creation, git corruption prevention
• Ramble GUI — PySide6/PyQt5 dialog for capturing structured feature requests
• Deterministic Builds — reproducible installer bundle

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Quick Start

# 1. Create and activate a virtual environment
python3 -m venv .venv
source .venv/bin/activate
pip install --upgrade pip wheel PySide6

# 2. Build the installer bundle
python tools/build_installer.py

# 3. Install into a project folder
python install/cascadingdev-*/setup_cascadingdev.py --target /path/to/myproject

Project Structure

CascadingDev/
├── assets/
│   ├── hooks/pre-commit     # Git pre-commit hook
│   ├── runtime/             # Runtime scripts (ramble.py, create_feature.py)
│   └── templates/           # Discussion and rule templates
├── src/cascadingdev/        # Python package
│   ├── setup_project.py     # Project initialization
│   ├── cli.py               # Command-line interface
│   └── ...
├── tools/                   # Build and test tools
└── docs/                    # Documentation

Pre-commit Hook Features

The pre-commit hook provides:

1. Secret Scanning - Prevents accidental commit of API keys and secrets
2. Summary Files - Auto-creates .sum.md companion files for discussions
3. Concurrency Safety - Uses flock to prevent git corruption from parallel commits

Environment variables:

• CDEV_SKIP_HOOK=1 - Skip all hook checks
• CDEV_SKIP_SUMMARIES=1 - Skip summary file generation

Related Projects

This project is part of a three-layer stack:

1. SmartTools - AI provider abstraction and tool execution
2. Orchestrated Discussions - Multi-agent discussion orchestration
3. Ramble - AI-powered structured field extraction GUI

License

MIT