pstack

Cursor plugin of engineering workflows, principles and playbooks: less code, higher quality, and enough verification that several agents can work in parallel.

pstack

Overview

Built by Lauren Tan (@poteto; previously Meta, Netflix, React core team) inside Cursor's plugins repo. Its premise: "throughput without quality is not a goal." AI agents write a lot of code; engineering also means understanding the existing system, choosing a design, verifying the result, reviewing the diff and shipping without breakage. pstack packages that discipline.

It is much bigger than a prompt pack: 23 workflow skills, 21 engineering principles, 22 task playbooks, 2 specialised subagents, helper programs and an optional automation pack (including issue triage).

The main entry point is /poteto-mode: describe the task, it picks a playbook (bug fix, performance, feature, refactor, overnight run…), builds a task list, delegates to suitable models and demands evidence before reporting success.

Notable skills

  • /how, /why, /teach, /recall — understand the current system, past decisions, and previous work.
  • /architect — design starting from caller usage.
  • /arena — competing attempts, synthesised.
  • /swarm — parallel agents.
  • /interrogate — send a diff to several models and triage findings.
  • Verification skills — "verify it" becomes a repo capability, not ad-hoc testing.

Works outside Cursor?

Yes, in part (per pstack-review-flavio-copes). The official package is a Cursor plugin, but the skills are SKILL.md files, the format Claude Code, Codex and others load; copy the skill folders into that tool's skills directory. pstack-claude is a ready-made, non-official Claude Code port (also ships a Codex plugin). Cursor remains the best fit since pstack assigns different models per role.

Why interesting

A full engineering-process framework shipped as skills, with verification and multi-model review as first-class steps. Compare gsd-core (spec-driven loop) and the moc-loop-engineering primitives. Heavyweight for small changes.

See moc-coding-harnesses-skills-frameworks.