Two shifts
You plan by day. The press runs at night.
Day shift
Humans, with Matt Pocock's skills, used interactively
+- grill
- spec
- issues
The human half of the workflow: shaping work into issues the factory can take on, by grilling the idea, writing the spec and cutting it into issues, and reviewing the pull requests it delivers.
Third shift
Agents, with headless copies of the same skills
+- implement
- review
- pull request
thirdshift takes one Issue URL per Run. Its Factory skills, adapted to run with no human in the loop, implement the issue, review the work and open a pull request that is ready for review.
Delivery pile
What comes off the press
Ready for review
An open pull request from the Issue branch to the Base branch. It is mergeable, its CI passes, and it has been reviewed against your repository's documented coding standards and against the issue. Otherwise thirdshift doesn't call it ready.
Unaddressed findings
Every Standards finding and Spec finding the agent chose not to fix is listed as an Unaddressed finding in the pull request body, so you decide on it.
Failed runs keep their work
A Failed run still pushes its work, so nothing is lost (if the push fails, it keeps the worktree instead), and its pull request goes back to draft. Run the same command again to continue it.
Proof sheets
Pulled from the press
Real pull requests thirdshift made on its own repository. Judge the work yourself.
-
+
Pull request #25 · closes issue #24
+Treat SIGHUP like SIGINT and SIGTERM
+A small fix with a real test: closing the terminal now stops the session and fails the Run cleanly, and it is the Run the press line replays.
+ Pull request #21 · closes issue #7
+Numbered Issue branches after a merged or closed PR
+A careful change to branch selection, where the agent flags a new error the issue didn't ask for, so a human can decide on it.
+ Pull request #22 · closes issue #9
+CI watching, CI-fix Repair and the Repair cap
+The factory building its own quality gate: the loop that watches CI and starts a Repair when checks fail.
+ Pull request #16 · closes issue #4
+Pre-flight checks
+Every check that runs before a Run creates anything, each with a clear message, including the Origin match.
+
Before you run it
Requirements and platforms
Requirements
+-
+
claude(Claude Code), logged in.
+ gh(GitHub CLI), logged in.
+ gitwith a globaluser.nameanduser.email, and credentials that can push to the repository.
+
Platforms
+-
+
- Rocky Linux 9.8 and later, x86_64. +
- Ubuntu 24.04.3 and later, x86_64. +
- WSL2, latest release, with Ubuntu 24.04 or later, x86_64. Keep your repositories on the Linux filesystem (e.g.
~/repos), not under/mnt/c. WSL1 is not supported.
+ - macOS Tahoe 26.5.2 and later, Apple Silicon. +
Details in the README.
+Colophon
Third shift
++My dad, Mark Stephens, was a pressman at Tursack Printing, the print shop Robert Tursack Sr. founded in Philadelphia in 1959. My dad worked third shift at the Morgantown, Pennsylvania plant, keeping the big four-color presses running through the night. Sometimes I got to visit, and I always wondered whether I'd end up in printing myself. The lineage carries on. Bob Tursack went on to found Brilliant Graphics in Exton, where my mom still does graphic design. This is as close as I am to printing right now.
+The printing press made copying words cheap. Agents are doing that for code. thirdshift is named for my dad's shift: the machines can run overnight, and I need something to keep them running.
+ - Jacob Stephens +