Data

Tools

Indexes

Applications

Experiments

Awesome

An open API service indexing awesome lists of open source software.

https://github.com/stablekernel/parley

Reach decisions asynchronously, without meetings. Each person talks to an AI on their own time; it participates, mediates, and carries the whole conversation between them in one self-describing Markdown file. No backend, no accounts — just a portable skill and an artifact passed hand to hand.
https://github.com/stablekernel/parley

Last synced: 14 days ago
JSON representation

Reach decisions asynchronously, without meetings. Each person talks to an AI on their own time; it participates, mediates, and carries the whole conversation between them in one self-describing Markdown file. No backend, no accounts — just a portable skill and an artifact passed hand to hand.

Awesome Lists containing this project

README 

          
# parley



**A way to hand off your thinking — not a summary of it — to someone who can't be at the keyboard

when you are.** You work a problem through with an AI; it captures your *full reasoning*; then

anyone you pass it to can **walk** that reasoning at their own depth, ask the AI *"wait, why not

X?"*, push down forks you never explored, and disagree — with you or with the AI. A decision is

one thing that can come out of it, not the point. No meetings, no real-time, no backend, no

recurring cost.



## What it's for



The honest reframe: a **summary** keeps conclusions and drops the reasoning; a **transcript**

keeps everything so nobody reads it; a **meeting** is lossy and one-shot. Parley is the medium

that transmits *the reasoning itself* — walkably, at the recipient's chosen depth, with an expert

at their elbow — and lets them extend it down paths you didn't take.



So it's for any time you've thought something through and need someone else to genuinely *get

there too*, on their own time: a design decision, a findings report, a pitch, a hard call you

want pressure-tested. The multi-person, async part is the *delivery context*; the value is the

thinking-transmission. The agent is an active expert, not a scribe — it leans in when it spots a

blind spot, stays quiet when the conversation is smooth, and never herds anyone to a conclusion.



## How it works — two documents



1. **The skill** (`.claude/skills/parley/SKILL.md`) — the "product": the facilitation

   rules, the per-turn loop, the guardrails, and the artifact schema. Versioned and

   swappable. Contains no conversation content.

2. **The artifact** (`parleys/.md`) — one file per conversation, holding all the

   state. Self-describing and stamped with the skill version that produced it, so a cold

   agent with no memory can pick it up and resume.



This code/data split is the heart of the design: the tool can evolve without touching any

live conversation, and a conversation can outlive any single session.



## Using it



- **Start one anywhere, no skill installed:** paste the contents of

  `.claude/skills/parley/SKILL.md` into any AI chat and just say what you want to work out.

  The rules are self-contained, so it'll run the parley and hand you back an artifact to pass

  to whoever goes next.

- **Start a parley:** just tell the agent what you want to work out — a sentence or a

  brain-dump is plenty; it draws the rest out in conversation, no form to fill in. It creates

  the artifact (in `parleys/.md` when there's a filesystem), and that opening

  conversation *is* turn 1. You never touch a template.

- **Continue one:** point the agent at the parley — it finds it in `parleys/`, or you paste it

  in — and say who you are. It offers you a door rather than a lecture: the bottom line, a walk

  through the reasoning, or jump straight to an open fork and run with it — and you're free to

  disagree (with the author or the agent). When you're done, tell it to write up; then pass it

  to whoever goes next.

- **Transport:** paste/send the artifact however your team already communicates. A shared

  file location works too — it's the same thing with nicer storage.

- **Non-installable surfaces (Slack/Chat):** the agent can export the parley as a **bundle**

  — a single `.bundle.md` file holding a read-only copy of the skill plus the

  artifact — so someone with no skill installed can paste it in and pick up the conversation.



## Layout



```

.claude/skills/parley/

  SKILL.md                      the facilitation skill (Document 1)

  references/

    artifact-template.md        blank artifact the agent starts from

    worked-example.md           a filled single-author, no-decision example

parleys/                        live conversation artifacts (Document 2 instances)

```



The name: *parley* — a talk across a divide between sides who aren't in the room together. It

names the **hand-off between people**, whether or not it ends in agreement. Renaming is a

one-line change in the skill frontmatter plus this file.