Plates

Keep your projects moving.

Every project is a plate. Plates keeps shared working practices current, runs the bounded work you allow, and brings you the decisions that need you. The All plates view shows your authorized projects; your workspace holds shared configuration and access.

Read the Plates philosophy for the principles behind the project and its incremental path toward small, safe changes on main and deliberate feature exposure.

Plates was previously named Keel. Existing executable calls remain supported through the keel alias; canonical configuration is .plates/plates.json. See the rename and compatibility guide before migrating an existing checkout.

The way of working came from four projects: isocan, ledger, duo and cajones. Each one copied it from the one before, by hand, and the copies drifted. Plates makes it one versioned thing. It does three jobs:

1. It is the source of the practice. Ways of working, each with the failure it prevents, live in practices/.
2. It carries changes out to projects. plates init and plates adopt install the practice. plates update and plates fleet update bring each new practice version as a pull request a person reads, or a local diff with plates update --local.
3. It is where lessons come home. A project sends what it learned (plates lessons). Plates turns that into proposals (plates learn), a person decides, and the next release carries the change to everyone.

For the private data repository and hosted UI setup, see Private workspace and web UI.

A project never depends on plates at runtime. Its workflows run from its own repo, with its own copies of the scripts they need.

If you are an agent, run plates --agent-help first. It prints a cold start: what plates is, every verb on one line, and the rules that bite. plates --agent-help opens the details, and all prints everything. It ships with the CLI, so it always matches the plates you have. The rest of this page is the same story, told for people, and the guides tell it one situation at a time.

Every plates project carries a short plates skill at .agents/skills/plates/SKILL.md (linked from .claude/skills/plates). An agent working there finds plates and runs plates --agent-help without being told.

Install

Node 24.22.1 or later, and git. No registry, no build step.

git clone https://github.com/dalmaer/plates ~/code/plates
npm install -g ~/code/plates

Then plates --version prints the CLI’s version, its commit, and the practice version it carries. The global install is a link to the checkout, so updating plates is a git pull there, and plates update does that for you first when the checkout can fast-forward cleanly.

The CLI version moves with every release. The practice version moves only