cairnpm/cairn
Self-hosted PM agent that turns a scattered stream of feedback into a roadmap you can reason about — Shape Up, code-aware, bring your own LLM key. - cairnpm/cairn
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README
Cairn
The hard part of building software moved from how to what. Cairn is the PM agent that turns a dense, scattered stream of feedback into a roadmap you can actually reason about — open, self-hosted, built on Shape Up.
cairnpm.com · Self-host · Roadmap · How the agent works · Contributing
Why Cairn? AI made shipping cheap: how to build something is no longer the bottleneck. The scarce skill now is deciding what to build — and in what order — in a roadmap that fills up faster than anyone can read it. Cairn is built for that exact moment: an agent does the sorting (read, deduplicate, shape, route) so your judgment goes to the decision, not the pile.
🪨 An agent, not a form. Paste a Slack thread, a bug report, or a whole meeting transcript. The intake agent extracts the distinct signals, recontextualizes each one, deduplicates against the backlog, and proposes where it belongs — you confirm. Writing only ever happens on confirmation. 🔍 Grounded in your real code. Link your product repo (read-only GitHub App or a local path) and the agent checks what's actually shipped before it shapes: it dedupes against reality — citing file:line, not a stale ticket — grounds each pitch in the real architecture, and answers "is X built yet?" by reconciling the roadmap with the code. Zero-egress: the repo is grepped locally, never sent anywhere. 🧗 Shape Up, natively. Pitches with a real problem and an appetite, a betting table to choose what's worth doing, hills to track in-flight work, frozen scope once a bet is placed. The method is the product, not a template. 🧹 Anti feature-factory. No artificial caps, no vanity metrics. The backlog is meant to stay small: duplicates get merged, noise gets discarded, shaping is a discipline — not a place where requests go to die. 🔌 Bring your own LLM key. The agent runs on your Anthropic key. No data detour through us — there is no "us" in the loop. 🏠 Self-hosted, you own the data. One Node process, one embedded SQLite file. No external database, no telemetry, no account on someone else's server. 🔓 Source-available. Read every line, audit it, run it for free forever. It even becomes Apache-2.0 over time (see License).
What's inside
Intake Conversational agent: triage → clarify → propose → commit. Reads .docx/images, splits transcripts into N features, dedupes, attributes every change.
Code-aware Link the product repo; the intake greps it to dedupe against what's shipped and ground specs. Read-only, zero-egress — GitHub App (short-lived tokens, self-host manifest flow) or a local clone.
Backlog Shaped features with problem · appetite · solution · rabbit holes · no-gos. Manually-assigned shapers.
Betting table Collaborative deliberation: members vote, the owner validates → it bets features and opens a hill.
Hills In-flight cycles with builders, periods and frozen scope.
Workspace Email + password auth, token invitations, roles, avatars, full attribution/audit trail.
Get started (self-host) Cairn is a single container backed by an embedded SQLite file — no external database. Bring an Anthropic API key (or add it later in the UI) and a place to keep /data. Pick whichever fits: One-click on Render:
Docker Compose (recommended for your own server): git clone https://github.com/cairnpm/cairn && cd cairn cp .env.example .env # set NUXT_SESSION_PASSWORD (and your Anthropic key) docker compose up -d # → http://localhost:3000 Also supported — Fly.io, plain Docker, backups and env vars: see DEPLOY.md. Prebuilt images are published to ghcr.io/cairnpm/cairn. First boot creates a single owner account — ceo@cairn.local / cairn — change the password right away. The workspace starts empty; set CAIRN_SEED_DEMO=1 to load a demo backlog/hills/team for a tour. Develop locally pnpm install echo 'ANTHROPIC_API_KEY=sk-ant-…' > .env pnpm dev # http://localhost:3000 pnpm test:members # hermetic auth/invitations test suite Drive it from an agent (CLI) cairn is a thin HTTP client over the running server, so an agent can ground itself on the roadmap and feed signal into the intake — no second write path. export CAIRN_URL=http://localhost:3000 export CAIRN_EMAIL=agent@your-workspace # use a DEDICATED, least-privilege account: export CAIRN_PASSWORD=… # the cached session can hit any endpoint it's a member of
pnpm exec cairn features --status shaping # reads: features / feature <id> / hills / betting / overview pnpm exec cairn capture "les users veulent le mode sombre" # → {session_id, state, agent_message, proposal} pnpm exec cairn capture --session <id> "priorité haute" # answer a clarify turn pnpm exec cairn commit --session <id> # finalise a single proposal pnpm exec cairn commit-batch --session <id> --segments a,b # finalise a decomposed (batch_review) capture Output is JSON by default (--pretty for humans). The session cookie is cached in ./.cairn/ relative to the working directory — run from the workspace root. The command surface is a closed allowlist (reads + intake); it's an agent guardrail, not a security boundary — a real boundary is the account's own permissions. Why source-available and not "free for everyone"? Cairn is free to run, read, modify and self-host — for any purpose except re-selling it as a competing hosted product. That single restriction is what lets a small team keep building it in the open instead of behind a closed door. It's licensed under the Functional Source License (FSL-1.1-ALv2): two years after each release, that version automatically becomes Apache-2.0. So the protection is temporary and the openness is permanent — you're never locked out of your own infrastructure, and our infra is never in your critical path.
Today everything is free and self-hostable. Team/organisation capabilities (SSO, multi-workspace, advanced integrations) may later require a license key — the core always runs without one. See the roadmap.
Tech
Nuxt 4 (Vue 3) + Nitro — SSR app and single write gateway node:sqlite — embedded database, zero native deps shadcn-vue + Tailwind v4 — dark, calm UI Anthropic Claude via a thin provider interface (swap-able; deterministic offline fallback)
Contributing Issues and PRs are welcome — see CONTRIBUTING.md for the setup, commit convention and how routing decisions are tested. Be kind; assume good intent. License FSL-1.1-ALv2 — source-available now, Apache-2.0 two years after each release. © 2026 The Cairn Authors. "Cairn" and the logo are trademarks and are not covered by the code license.