watchfire generate

Generate a project definition using a coding agent.

Alias: watchfire gen

Usage

watchfire generate

Description

watchfire generate spawns an agent session that analyzes your codebase and generates a project definition for project.yaml. This is useful when starting with an existing codebase and you want the agent to understand and document the project structure, conventions, and architecture.

The generated definition is saved to your project.yaml and serves as context for all future agent sessions.

Flags

Flag	Description
--sandbox <backend>	Override the sandbox backend. Valid values: auto, seatbelt, landlock, bubblewrap, none.
--no-sandbox	Shorthand for --sandbox none — disables sandboxing entirely.

Sandbox priority: CLI flag → project setting (project.yaml) → global default (settings.yaml).

These flags also apply to watchfire plan.

Agent Selection

Both watchfire generate and watchfire plan run on the project's default agent, falling back to the global default and finally to claude-code. Any of the supported backends (Claude Code, Codex, opencode, Gemini, Copilot) can perform definition and task generation. See Supported Agents.

Related: watchfire plan

To generate tasks from an existing project definition, use:

watchfire plan

This spawns an agent session that reads your project definition and creates a set of tasks in .watchfire/tasks/. It's useful for breaking down a project into actionable work items.

Examples

# Generate a project definition from your codebase
watchfire generate

# Using the alias
watchfire gen

# Generate tasks from the project definition
watchfire plan