Plumbline + Homeowner: a real test, and a plugin bug worth knowing

Been building out Plumbline, my spec-driven agent workflow for Claude Code — a chain of single-job agents (scaffold → architect → foreman → builder → inspector) with a new orchestrator, "homeowner," that takes a written brief to specced, tested, committed code, halting and surfacing whenever a stage hits something it can't safely cross.

I reinstalled it clean and put it on a couple of side projects this week — and the "halt and surface" rule earned its keep by finding a bug for me. Homeowner stalled on step one: the architect subagent came back having done nothing — 0 tool calls, printing <invoke name="Bash"> as literal text. That's the tell-tale sign of an agent spawned with no tools granted. Cause: the agent frontmatter said tools: [read, write] — lowercase. Claude Code's tool allowlist is case-sensitive, so it silently dropped every grant and spawned the agents tool-less. Fix was just tools: [Read, Write, Edit, Glob, Grep].

Takeaway: if a restricted subagent ever goes silent or prints its tool calls as text, check the case on its tools list first. And an orchestrator that stops on weirdness beats one that plows ahead — the stop is what led me to the bug.

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Plumbline + Homeowner: a real test, and a plugin bug worth knowing