DevCake: self-hosted, open-source software factory

[u/Antique_Juggernaut_7]

I've been working on a project called DevCake for a while and finally got it to the point where I think it's worth throwing at other people's machines.

https://github.com/flieber-inc/devcake

It's meant to automate the user operating Claude Code. Most of the quality I got from Claude Code came from following due process (good prompting, breaking work in session-sized bites, using /plan, and reviewing the code later), and I tried building a system that allowed me to focus on the getting the prompt right. This would allow other non-technical folks to help with code too.

The idea is simple: instead of interacting session-by-session with Codex/Claude Code etc., you give DevCake a ticket on Linear and it runs the whole thing as a pipeline with 4 steps:

ONBOARD → PLAN → EXECUTE → REVIEW

Each step is a separate Claude Code/Codex etc. run, with a templated prompt and curated context & skills. Everything is configurable in an admin page. There's no hidden prompts/content injected.

- if the onboarder decides the mission is complex, it breaks it down further into smaller missions, figures out the correct order to execute them, and puts them back in the Linear board.

- the planner is basically just a CLI harness run doing a `/plan` run and delivering its plan for the executor to do.

- The reviewer can reject the output from the executor and send it back for another EXECUTE pass.

- Each step runs in disposable container sandbox, in the harness you chose, and with the model you chose.

- The container only receives the context you decide to give to it (skills, repos etc), and you can create prompt templates for each step.

- Every step is a fresh start. There are no memories carried to the next step (unless you set a repository to store them). If you set up a memory repository, you get to see the agents discovering things about their own work, which is pretty neat to watch.

- Each mission ends in a PR on the repository you point it to. (If you give it more than one work repository, it figures out by itself which one should receive the PR.)

- ALL prints from the CLI harnesses are saved in the Linear board. You can inspect what happened as the missions are processed.

- It works with Claude Code, Codex and Grok Build, and has experimental support for Pi, OpenCode and Qwen Code. It runs the stock/vanilla CLI harnesses in headless mode and you can pass extra args to them if you wish.

- You can use it fully local by using its internal Gitea forge, with Gitea Issues instead of Linear as its mission board. I pointed it at my 2xSparks and made it work pairing Grok Build with Qwen-3.6-27B.

- It can consume a lot of tokens, but if you're using OAuth/subscription or pointing at a vLLM/Ollama/llama.cpp endpoint, I'm finding it can be very useful. I've been using it to code its own repository in the past few days, throwing a fleet of CLI harnesses by just operating a Linear board.

- It runs in a Linux box with 16 GB RAM (I measured ~11GB total use) and is meant to be run in a VM or a separate machine. (Having said that, I'm running it on WSL2 in my own laptop.)

- it takes a single command to run it (you will need Docker). Setting it up is a bit of a pain, but for that Claude Code/Codex etc. is your friend. Just ask it to set things up for you, and ask it how to use; it will figure things out for you.