Pstack

pstack — standalone mirror

Mirror of cursor/plugins/pstack by Poteto — kept in sync for standalone use. Sponsored by Plannotator.

Poteto's Bro Skill was created by me, backnotprop/bro

Install

pstack is a folder of plain Agent Skills (skills/<name>/SKILL.md). You don't need Cursor. The skills CLI installs them into Claude Code, Codex, Pi, Cursor, OpenCode, and other agents:

npx skills add backnotprop/pstack

The CLI shows every skill in a list you can search. Select the skills you want, then select your agents.

Skills

Cursor's original README is further down this page.

These skills don't call other pstack skills, so each one works alone:

unslop, bro, how, tdd, typescript-best-practices, arena, swarm, interrogate, reflect, show-me-your-work, figure-it-out, automate-me, correct, benchmark-checklist, in-your-own-words, sharpen, statechart

Some skills call other skills. Install these together:

Skills that spawn subagents point to the Subagents section of poteto-mode to pick each subagent's effort. Without poteto-mode, they use the default effort.

What this mirror changes

Many skills were Cursor-specific. They've been rewritten to work in any harness.

The mirror also carries two community fixes that aren't upstream yet:

• no-comments keeps a comment about an outside rule (a dependency, platform, or protocol) when it can't check the rule, and marks it for review instead of deleting it. A rejected review no longer stops the whole run. (#14)
• statechart runs on Windows: it no longer needs /bin/sh, reads TLC output with Windows line endings, and cleans up its temp folder after a killed run. Patch by @yasuyuki. (#17)

pstack

See Pstack Blog

i'm poteto. i'm not a president or ceo, but i've worked with millions of lines of code at Meta, Netflix, and Cursor. i'm also on the react core team where i help build and maintain react compiler.

there's a growing sense that ai writes too much slop code. i agree. i don't want to ship like a team of twenty slop artists. throughput without quality is not a goal i aspire to. if you want to go fast, go deep first.

pstack is my answer. these are the same skills i use every day to ship high quality code at Cursor. this turns cursor into a real engineering team. the goal is not to maximize loc, in fact it's the opposite. pstack helps you write less, but higher quality code.

pstack gives you fearless parallelism. when you can go deep on one agent and trust it to write good, verifiable code, you can truly parallelize with confidence. start multiple agents up with poteto-mode and trust that they'll apply rigorous engineering principles to their work.

cursor gives you the best of all worlds. every frontier model has its strengths and weaknesses. use any model with pstack. in fact, many of my skills use multi-model workflows to take advantage of each model's unique strengths.

fork it. improve it. make it yours. PRs are welcome!

install

/add-plugin pstack

in claude code:

/plugin marketplace add cursor/plugins
/plugin install pstack@cursor-plugins

claude code leaves auto-update off for third-party marketplaces, so pstack stays on the version you installed. to turn it on, run /plugin, open the marketplaces tab, select cursor-plugins, and choose enable auto-update. to update once by hand, run claude plugin update pstack@cursor-plugins.

claude code prefixes plugin commands and agents, so /poteto-mode is /pstack:poteto-mode. the claude code adapter maps every other cursor name. in claude code, /pstack:setup-pstack writes your model choices to ~/.claude/rules/pstack-models.md, and a step that needs a cursor-only feature, such as bugbot or automations, is skipped with a one-line note.

claude code installs a generated copy of pstack, including this readme and the guide, from harness/pstack/ at the repository root. after you change pstack, run node scripts/generate-pstack-harness-trees.mjs from the repository root and commit the result. ci fails while the generated copy is out of date.

get started

two steps:

1. run /setup-pstack, pick a reasoning budget, and choose which models you want.
2. use /poteto-mode whenever you're doing anything that requires rigor.

new here? the pstack guide walks you through a first real task, from setup and prompting through verification and overnight runs. stuck, or unsure which skill fits? ask /poteto-help.

that's it. the other skills are situational, and the mode skill uses them for you as needed. out of the box the mode splits work by model strength: code delegates (feature, refactoring, bug fix, perf, hillclimb) go to grok, while the hardest changes, prose, and judgment go to opus 5.5. the default panel is opus 5.5 / grok. /setup-pstack changes any of it.

usage

use /poteto-mode at the start of a task. it reads your request, picks from a set of playbooks, and runs the other skills as the steps need them.

pick /poteto-mode from the / menu before you type your task, so cursor attaches the skill to the message.

just use /poteto-mode

this skill is the main shortcut. i use it whenever i need the agent to do rigorous engineering work. it comes with twenty-three playbooks:

/poteto-mode this pr has a subtle bug where the scroll drifts every 750ms even when idle. repro
first, then fix and verify.

/poteto-mode i'm going to bed. land the stack even if ci flakes. i want everything merged by
morning.

when invoked it:

1. matches your task to a playbook and opens a todo list whose first items are its steps, copied in verbatim.
2. routes to the other skills as the steps fire.
3. writes unslopped replies framed for the consumer and the maintainer.

the full rules and playbooks live in skills/poteto-mode/SKILL.md.

to keep /poteto-mode on across turns, pick it from the / menu and press option+enter (mac) or alt+enter (windows) instead of enter. that makes it a custom mode, which cursor offers in the agents window and the cli. it stays in context every turn until you exit the mode. plain enter attaches it to one message only.

/poteto-mode works extremely well with cursor's /loop command. you can make cursor work for many hours without sacrificing rigor.

skills

/poteto-mode runs most of these for you when a step needs them (how, why, architect, arena, swarm, interrogate, unslop, no-comments, technical-writing, tdd, and the principles). the table below is for when you want one directly:

/how do we cancel runs? do we have an n+1 when we look up every run to cancel?

/interrogate review this pr.

examples

mostly i type /poteto-mode at the start of a task and let it route to a playbook. the other skills fire as the steps need them. a few i reach for directly.

bug fix:           /poteto-mode this pr has a subtle bug where the scroll drifts every 750ms even
                   when idle. repro first, then fix and verify.
perf:              /poteto-mode a big list takes a second or two to load even though we virtualize.
                   run a cpu trace and tell me why.
feature:           /poteto-mode build a small feature behind a feature flag. verify it really works.
prototype:         /poteto-mode build two prototypes of the markdown renderer so we can compare.
                   spawn an agent for each.
multi-phase:       /poteto-mode open source these skills as a plugin. nothing internal leaks, work
                   in a temp dir, show me the dependency graph first.
overnight run:     /poteto-mode i'm going to bed. land the stack even if ci flakes. i want
                   everything merged by morning.
babysit:           /poteto-mode check on pr 123. anything outstanding?
visual parity:     /poteto-mode the row spacing is too tall when this flag is on. the second image
                   is correct. repro and fix until it matches.
figure it out:     /poteto-mode i'm stepping away. migrate every caller from the synchronous store
                   to the new async one, keeping behavior identical. i want to trust it was done
                   right when i'm back.
how:               /how do we cancel runs? do we have an n+1 when we look up every run to cancel?
why:               /why is this feature flag not on yet?
architect:         design this instrumentation to be high signal with no false positives. /architect
                   this first.
arena:             /arena take my prompt to the arena verbatim. i want to compare their proposals
                   with yours.
swarm:             /swarm check every package under packages/ against its check.sh. one worker per
                   package. one report.
interrogate:       /interrogate review this pr.
tdd:               /tdd implement
unslop:            can we unslop and tighten the new changes?
reflect:           /reflect that took too long. capture what we learned so the next run doesn't
                   repeat it.
correct:           /correct
show-me-your-work: /show-me-your-work keep a decision trail i can review when i'm back.
automate-me:       /automate-me
help:              /poteto-help which skill should i use to review this branch?

the poteto-agent and Comment Sicko subagents

/poteto-mode runs in the chat that receives it. that chat owns the playbook, the todo list, and every subagent spawn.

pstack also ships subagent_type: "poteto-agent" as the wrapper for delegates spawned during a run. it reads poteto-mode in full, including its inline principles index, before doing any work. substituting generalPurpose skips that read and drifts. do not spawn poteto-agent to run the playbook itself.

/poteto-mode and subagent_type: "poteto-agent" route through the same wrapper.

pstack also ships Comment Sicko, a read-only comment reviewer available as subagent_type: "comment-sicko". usually invoke it through /no-comments, not directly.

principles

twenty-four short skills, one principle each. poteto-mode indexes them inline and reads that index at task start. the standalone files are there so other skills can reference a principle by name, and so the index can point at the full rule for each.

not shipped here

a few things poteto-mode references but doesn't bundle:

• /deslop and the deslop skill ship in the cursor-team-kit plugin.
• control-cli (for CLIs and TUIs) and control-ui (for browser, Electron, web) ship in cursor-team-kit too.
• /create-skill is a cursor built-in. cursor also ships a built-in /autopilot that watches a pr. inside poteto-mode

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