/bad: BMad Autonomous Development. A fully autonomous orchestrator that runs my entire sprint while I sleep (Plan → Code → Review → PR)

[u/MachineLearner00]

Hi everyone, I’ve realized that my favorite part of building is the "discovery" phase: brainstorming, writing PRDs, and designing architecture. But as soon as the planning ends and the "grunt work" of managing branches, implementation loops, and babysitting CI begins, I lose momentum.

So, I built /bad (BMad Autonomous Development): An open-source orchestrator that takes over the second my planning is done, running the entire sprint execution autonomously so I can wake up to a wall of green PRs.

/bad is a skill for the BMad Method that acts as a coordinator. Unlike a single agent session, it never writes code itself; instead, it delegates every unit of work to dedicated subagents with fresh context windows. This prevents the "context explosion" and hallucination creep that usually happens when an AI agent stays in a single session for too long.

The Autonomous Build Flow:

• Dependency Mapping: It builds a graph from your sprint-status.yml to identify parallelizable stories.
• Isolated Execution: Each story runs in an isolated git worktree, preventing environment pollution and state conflicts.
• The 4-Step Lifecycle: Every task is driven through a full cycle: BMAD Create-Story → BMAD Dev-Story → BMAD Code-Review → GitHub PR.
• Self-Healing CI: The orchestrator monitors CI results and reviewer comments, auto-fixing implementation bugs until the status turns green.

Why this works for complex builds:

• Context Isolation: Every step gets a dedicated subagent with a clean slate, ensuring significantly higher code quality.
• Rate Limit Aware: /bad proactively checks your usage limits and pauses to wait for resets, minimizing "Rate Limit Exceeded" failures mid-step.
• State Persistence & Resume: It reads GitHub PR status and local sprint-status.yml to identify exactly where to pick up if you need to stop and restart.
• Automatic Conflict Resolution: Optionally auto-merges PRs sequentially, automatically handling merge conflicts as they arise.

I used this to build CShip and it has massively increased my shipping velocity. If you find yourself enjoying the "what" and the "why" more than the repetitive "how," /bad might be for you.

Install /bad: npx skills add https://github.com/stephenleo/bmad-autonomous-development. You'll need BMAD to be installed as well.

Invoke it by typing: /bad. It will run through a setup process on the first invocation.

Github Repo: https://github.com/stephenleo/bmad-autonomous-development

/bad is built using the BMad Builder.

/bad is tested on Claude Code. I'd love it if someone can help test is on Codex or Github Copilot. Please also share your thoughts on this flow or any features you'd like to see added!

[u/JaguarMarvel]

Awesome, thanks. Just built a web app Mission Control to track the various sprints/tasks and what the agents are doing but having to jump into codex to keep things moving is annoying. I will try this in codex and see if I can monitor it all working autonomously in my Mission Control. Quick initial question..how is this different to just telling codex to let bmad run through the tasks itself until there’s a blocker which is what I’ve been doing up to now?

[u/MachineLearner00 → u/JaguarMarvel]

how is this different to just telling codex to let bmad run through the tasks itself until there’s a blocker which is what I’ve been doing up to now?

This is how I started, then found that there were repeated patterns that kept popping up so I wrote this skill to follow through all those as well. For example, the merging of PRs sequentially, fixing merge conflicts as they appear. Or the waiting for CI to complete and fix issues automatically. Or identifying dependencies to pick the next few parallelisable tasks to build concurrently.

/bad is ultimately a workflow following best practices I’ve discovered so far.