Install Cadence

With the mental model in hand (six stages, readable artifacts, gates you approve), installing is quick. The plugin installs once and then works in every repository on your machine.

Install the plugin

Install commands

/plugin marketplace add sentasity/cadence
/plugin install cadence@cadence

What you'll see

After a session restart, all ten /c-* commands are available. There’s no separate setup step. The first time you run /c-brainstorm in a fresh repo, Cadence offers to scaffold its config for you (you’ll do that in the next lesson).

Restart your session

The commands appear only after you restart your Claude Code session. If /c-brainstorm isn’t recognized, restart and try again.

Confirm the ten commands are there

Confirm Cadence is installed

1. Restart your Claude Code session

   After /plugin install cadence@cadence, fully restart the session so the plugin’s commands register.

2. Type a slash and look for /c-

   Begin typing /c- in the prompt. You should see the six core commands (/c-brainstorm, /c-design, /c-plan, /c-execute, /c-audit, /c-validate), the three diagnostics (/c-check, /c-find-bugs, /c-explain), and the /c-worktree utility.

3. You’re ready

   Ten commands visible means the plugin is live in this repo and every other repo on your machine. The tenth, /c-worktree, is a worktree utility, not a pipeline stage; the course doesn’t use it. Move on to your first brainstorm.

Throughout the rest of Get Started you’ll build one tiny feature (a function that prints the current time) and at the end compare your output against the finished worked example shipped with Cadence at examples/hello-cadence/. Same shape of artifacts means you did it right.

Next: Your first brainstorm. Scaffold the config and converge a fuzzy idea into a stub.