core — guides¶

core is the flagship pack: the loop your agent can't cut corners in. Plan and surface assumptions, hard gates between "done" and done, adversarial review in a fresh session, and capture what was learned. The skills (work-loop, new-spec, bug-fix, adapt-to-project), the four reviewer/executor subagents, and the pre-pr + session-start hooks all compose into one loop.

New here? Why loop engineering is the why — the leverage has moved off the prompt and onto the loop. The core pack as a system is the full map. Then build something with plan and execute non-trivial work.

Tutorials¶

Learning-oriented, start-to-finish.

• From idea to a walking skeleton — stand up a new project the structured way, end to end.

How-to¶

Task-oriented recipes for a problem you already have.

• Plan and execute non-trivial work — the loop itself, applied to a feature or change.
• Fix a bug — the diagnose-then-fix path, with a regression test as the receipt.
• Adapt a freshly-installed pack to your project — tailor the defaults to your repo after install.
• Review a branch or PR you didn't write — point the reviewers at anyone's diff.
• Intake an external brief into a product brief — turn unstructured external input (email, message, issue) into a DoR-ready product brief.
• Receive a product brief and decompose it into specs — turn a multi-feature handoff into shippable specs.
• Decide and record your foundation during inception — the ADR + reference.md you write before the first feature.

Reference¶

Information-oriented, dry and complete.

• Spec Shape: and the plan's ## Design (LLD) — the fields, what they mean, and how the stack is derived.
• Product brief fields — the brief field list and the linkage it stamps on derived specs.

Explanation¶

Understanding-oriented — the why behind the design.

• The core pack as a system — how the parts compose, and how it compares to vibe-coding, Spec Kit, and Kiro's spec mode.
• The token economy of the loop — what the loop wastes, what it spends on purpose, and why the cold reviewer earns its cost.
• Why the plan owns the LLD — where the low-level design lives and why it isn't in the spec.
• About the walking skeleton — the thinnest end-to-end slice, and when to throw code away instead.
• About foundation vs. map — the two things you record at inception and why they're different.
• Why a brief layer — why a brief sits above the spec when work spans many features.
• Role journeys — how PMs, engineers, and agents use the system at their operating altitude.

Cross-cutting guides — installing the catalogue, upgrading packs, the adapter support matrix — live in ../_shared/.