Mellos Mapping

Mellos Mapping

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A live, terminal-native map of bottom-up development for Claude Code, ChatGPT desktop Codex mode and Codex CLI.

While Claude builds your system, a split pane beside the conversation shows the system's layered dependency map: primitive layers at the bottom, dependency edges that may only point downward, ghost nodes for what is designed, a spinner on what is being built right now, and solid green for what is built *and verified*.

*A real session: Claude Code on the left, the map pane on the right. L0 is verified, L1 just lit up, everything above is still a ghost.*

Why

Most progress reporting is a task list — a top-down worldview. A Mellos map grows the other way: an upper node can only stand on nodes below it, and the picture makes the discipline visible:

• The ghost design appears before any code. Claude declares the whole intended structure as dashed ghost nodes first; you can veto a bad design while it is still only a picture.
• The spinner is where Claude's attention is. One glance answers "what is it doing right now, and on top of what?"
• Done means verified. A node turns solid green only with evidence (a passing test run). If later work cracks a foundation, the node turns red — a cracked foundation under a spinning upper floor is the most honest status report there is.
• The map is a ledger, not a judge. The tools refuse only structural corruption (an edge pointing upward, a duplicate rank). Workflow is Claude's discipline, defined in the bundled skill; violations are made *visible*, never silently blocked.

Install

Clone the branch for your host, then run one command. No build is required.

Requires Node.js 18.17+ on the 18.x line, or 20.3+, and the corresponding host CLI on PATH. Supported platforms are Windows 10+, macOS 13.0+ and Linux with glibc 2.28+, each on x64 or arm64. The OS must also meet the selected Node.js version's requirements. Native lock bindings ship with the release; no local compilation is needed. The installer checks release integrity and all eight MCP tools, retains the runtime outside the clone, and configures the host. Start a new conversation after installation. See release and branch instructions.

Claude Code's marketplace installation is also available:

Two lines inside any Claude Code conversation:

/plugin marketplace add GuangminJu/mellos-mapping

/plugin install mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

Or one line in a terminal:

claude plugin marketplace add GuangminJu/mellos-mapping && claude plugin install mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

Requires the same Node.js and platform versions on PATH (install Node separately when using native Claude Code). No build step: dist/ is committed, so a clone runs as-is — dist/server.mjs (the MCP server), dist/watch.mjs (the pane), dist/mmap.mjs (the mmap toggle), dist/hook-session-start.mjs (the SessionStart hook that hooks/hooks.json registers) and dist/store-paths.mjs (the store's path vocabulary, which the plain-node pane launcher imports instead of restating filenames).

omp (Oh My Pi) reads the same plugin layout the Claude Code edition ships — the same marketplace catalog, .mcp.json, skill and slash command — so one release serves both hosts:

omp plugin marketplace add GuangminJu/mellos-mapping

omp plugin install mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

That install follows main, where a release is a version bump. To freeze a version instead, add a checkout of one — the Claude Code edition ZIP from the GitHub Release, or a clone at the release tag:

omp plugin marketplace add "<checkout or extracted release directory>"

omp plugin install mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

omp never reads hooks/hooks.json, so the session paragraph arrives through the plugin's omp host adapter (dist/omp-extension.mjs, declared in package.json#omp.extensions): the same store, the same policy text, and the same mmap shim install as the Claude hook. The pane is the same terminal split beside the session. Install it *as a plugin*: neither omp plugin link nor the npm package is a plugin, and both would leave the tools behind. See omp installation and limitations.

pi reads none of that layout: it loads an extension and has no MCP of its own, by design. So the plugin speaks MCP to itself — the extension declared in package.json#pi.extensions (dist/pi-extension.mjs) starts the same dist/server.mjs in the session's directory, which makes the eight mmap_* tools the same eight, under the same names, and builds the session paragraph from the same store and the same policy text the Claude hook prints:

pi install npm:mellos-mapping

Add -l to install it for the current project instead of every one, then start a new session: pi discovers packages at session start. The package's skills/ and commands/ travel with it — the same map discipline, and /mmap for the same slash command. See pi installation and behaviour.

The first session after installing asks you one question — how eager mapping should be — and records the answer for every project you will ever open. From then on the hook carries it into each new session by itself; there is no per-project setup step. See Setup: choose when maps open.

The mmap terminal command (the pane's open/close toggle) installs itself on Windows: the same hook notices on session start when the shim is missing or points at an older install, writes mmap.cmd (cmd, PowerShell) and mmap (git-bash) into %LOCALAPPDATA%\mellos-mapping\bin, appends that one directory to your user PATH, and tells you so through the assistant. The PATH change reaches only new processes — and a new tab of a running Windows Terminal inherits the old environment, so close the terminal app entirely and reopen it before the first mmap. The PATH edit keeps the installer's guarantees: nothing happens when the entry is already there, and a PATH that setx would damage (flattened %VARIABLE% references, truncation past its limit) is refused outright.

A refused PATH is not a dead end: the same two shims are then written into %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\WindowsApps (or ~/.local/bin) — a directory your PATH already names — so mmap is runnable in a new terminal with no PATH change at all. Machines with a long PATH are exactly where that happens, and where it matters most. The command takes the page to open as an argument (mmap omp-host-support), and closes the pane when it is already open.

The step behind it is still a command of its own, for the cases the hook does not cover — --uninstall, or re-adding a PATH entry you removed while the shims stayed put:

node "<plugin dir>/scripts/install-mmap-command.mjs" [--uninstall]

(--json prints the install outcome as one JSON line instead of prose — the mode the hook itself calls it in.) npm i -g mellos-mapping provides the same mmap via bin, no shims involved.

Update

claude plugin marketplace update mellos-mapping && claude plugin update mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

Two steps because plugin update compares against the locally cached marketplace clone — the first command is what actually pulls this repo. Restart Claude Code to apply. Releases are version bumps on main. (In-app, /plugin opens the same management UI.)

omp updates with its own two steps:

omp plugin marketplace update mellos-mapping && omp plugin upgrade mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping

Close the pane first (q in it): the watcher runs from the plugin copy, and on Windows an open file cannot be renamed away, so an upgrade attempted while a pane is open can fail with EPERM and leave the plugin cache empty — repaired by omp plugin install mellos-mapping@mellos-mapping --force. Then: the first command refreshes the catalog, the second reinstalls from it. omp also refreshes a catalog entry it has not updated for a day at startup, unless marketplace.autoUpdate is off — in the default notify mode that check writes its finding to the debug log only, so marketplace update is the step that makes an update visible. upgrade does not compare versions: it force-reinstalls whatever the catalog names, which is why a release is identified by its version bump rather than gated by it. Restart omp afterwards, and reopen a pane still showing the old bundle (q in it, then mmap_open again).

pi updates the package it installed, with no marketplace in between:

pi update npm:mellos-mapping

That is the npm source; a git source is reconciled to the ref your settings name by pi's own update, and a versioned spec (npm:mellos-mapping@0.27.0) is pinned and skipped. Restart the session afterwards: a session owns the map server process it started, so one still running keeps the copy it began with until it ends.

Upgrading from 0.19

0.20 moved the store out of .claude/ — the map belongs to this tool, not to one client — into .mellos/. The server and the watcher each perform the move once at startup, and print exactly one line on stderr when they do (mellos-mapping: moved the legacy .claude map store to .mellos/ — commit the move.):

Nothing is merged and nothing is overwritten: a project that already has a .mellos/ store (map, pages or config) is left untouched, whatever the legacy directory still holds. If you keep your maps in git, commit the move — git add -A .claude .mellos records it as renames rather than as a pile of deletions plus untracked files.

That one move is the only time either process touches .claude/. Afterwards the tools write nowhere but .mellos/, and never outside the project directory they resolved at startup.

ChatGPT App · Codex mode

This is Codex mode in the ChatGPT desktop app (also called Codex App). From the source branch run the following command; on chatgpt-app, omit the host argume