Athena Flow – a workflow runtime for Claude Code with a terminal UI

Name: Athena Flow – a workflow runtime for Claude Code with a terminal UI
Availability: InStock
Author: nadeem1

by nadeem1·Mar 4, 2026·2 points·1 comment

Visit Project View on HN

AI Analysis

●●SolidBig BrainWizardryNiche Gem

E2E test builder using Claude Code with semantic browser snapshots, but execution depends on Claude's availability.

Strengths

•Semantic page snapshots (19% fewer tokens than raw DOM) + custom agent-web-interface MCP reduce hallucinations and cost per task
•Structured lifecycle hooks and workflow persistence via SQLite enable reproducible, debuggable multi-step automation runs
•Real-world demo: generates Playwright test code from plain English feature descriptions with self-healing retry logic

Weaknesses

•Core value proposition hinges entirely on Claude Code API stability and inference cost—no graceful degradation if Claude is unavailable
•Narrow initial use case (e2e-test-builder)—unclear if workflow framework generalizes beyond testing without more examples

Post Description

Athena Flow is a workflow runtime that wraps Claude Code via its hooks system. It receives the event stream, applies workflow and plugin logic, persists session state in SQLite, and renders everything in an interactive terminal UI with a live event feed.

Instead of writing throwaway prompts or one-off scripts to automate complex multi-step tasks, you define a workflow once — with prompt templates, loops, plugin bundles, and structured lifecycle hooks — and run it against any project.

The first workflow I shipped is e2e-test-builder. It navigates your app like a human, writes structured test case specs with preconditions, steps, and expected outcomes, then generates Playwright code from them. The browser layer is handled by a separate MCP server I built called agent-web-interface, which produces semantic page snapshots instead of raw DOM — ~19% fewer tokens and ~33% faster task completion in early benchmarks against Playwright MCP.

The stack is three repos: athena-flow is the runtime (hooks -> UDS -> event pipeline -> TUI), agent-web-interface is the MCP server for token-efficient browser interaction, and athena-workflow-marketplace is where workflows and plugins live, resolved by ref like e2e-test-builder@lespaceman/athena-workflow-marketplace.

Workflows are composable — a workflow bundles plugins and can be shared via any Git repo. Writing your own is just a workflow.json and a prompt file.

Currently Claude Code only, but Codex support is in progress. Free if you already have a Claude Code subscription, no separate API key needed. MIT licensed.

Docs: https://athenaflow.in GitHub: https://github.com/lespaceman/athena-flow

Would love feedback, especially from anyone building on Claude Code hooks or thinking about workflow portability across agent runtimes.