Decompose any codebase. Accumulate its ideas. Compose new systems from them.
Introduction Get Started Origin Story View on GitHub ↗Work in progress — OpenTransmute is under active development. Token usage, prompting strategies, and overall output quality are areas of active improvement. Expect rough edges.
What is OpenTransmute?
Software is full of durable ideas — algorithms, design patterns, invariants, and abstractions — that outlive the language, framework, or organisation that first wrote them. OpenTransmute makes these ideas explicit, searchable, and portable.
It ships as a self-hosted local web app and a CLI (otx), both backed by the same SQLite database.
The Workflow
🔬 Decompose
Point OpenTransmute at a git repository or local folder. Eight AI-driven phases produce a complete language-agnostic specification and a searchable composition inventory.
Learn more →📚 Accumulate
Each inventory is parsed into a local SQLite database. Over time, as you decompose more codebases, you build a cross-project library of reusable ideas.
Learn more →🔀 Transmute
Re-implement a whole decomposed project in a new language or framework directly — without going through the inventory basket.
Learn more →🎨 Compose
Pick algorithms, patterns, and abstractions from across projects, add them to a basket, and synthesise new architectural designs validated for correctness and security.
Learn more →⚙️ Implement
Feed a compose or transmute output into the Implement pipeline. The AI writes a complete, working implementation from the spec.
Learn more →AI Backends
OpenTransmute works with the AI backend of your choice:
| Backend | Description |
|---|---|
| Claude Agent (CLI) | Invokes claude as a subprocess. No file packing required. Auto-maps phase weights to Opus / Sonnet / Haiku. |
| OpenAI-compatible | Any OpenAI-compatible API — OpenAI, Azure AI Foundry, LM Studio, vLLM, and others. |
| Ollama | Local Ollama at localhost:11434. Full privacy, no API key required. |
See AI Backends for setup instructions.
Documentation
| Section | Contents |
|---|---|
| Introduction | What OpenTransmute is and how it thinks about software |
| Getting Started | Prerequisites, installation, and first run |
| Workflows | Step-by-step guides for Decompose, Compose, Transmute, and Implement |
| CLI Reference | Every otx command, option, and flag |
| Reference | Phases, inventory categories, output files, prompt customisation |
| Contributing | Adding backends, inventory categories, phases, and more |
| Genesis | Why OpenTransmute was built — the experiments and the shift that made it possible |
Quick Example
# Install the CLI
dotnet tool install --global --add-source ./src/OpenTransmute.Cli otx
# Decompose a repository
otx decompose https://github.com/org/repo
# Browse the inventory
otx inventory --category Algorithm
# Compose a new design from what you found
otx compose --output my-design \
--project repo \
--description "A resilient API gateway" \
--technology "Go, gRPC"