The framework’s single entry point and its router. /poteto-mode reads the request, matches it to one of twenty-three playbooks, opens a todo list whose first items are that playbook’s steps copied in verbatim, and then routes to the other skills as the steps fire. Everything else in pstack is situational; the README’s whole getting-started instruction is run pstack-setup-pstack once, then use this.
It is a sticky mode (mode: true in its frontmatter, with a reminder field the harness re-injects each turn). Once entered it stays on across turns, applying itself when a playbook matches or the task needs rigor and staying out of the way otherwise. The user opts out by saying so. This is a materially different router design from the wiki’s other dispatchers: gstack-router and addy-using-agent-skills dispatch per invocation, and sp-using-superpowers achieves persistence by making every leaf skill auto-trigger. pstack instead makes the router persistent and leaves every leaf skill explicitly non-auto-invocable (disable-model-invocation: true on all of them).
The three parts of the skill
Triggers. A list of standing if-then rules mapping a situation to a skill: nontrivial change or an “are we sure?” question goes to pstack-how; code crossing a function boundary goes to pstack-architect; parallel fan-out splits between pstack-swarm (coverage, races, gauntlets) and pstack-arena (design and code bakeoffs); a contested design goes to pstack-interrogate; any prose surface goes to pstack-unslop; anything the user steps away from goes to pstack-show-me-your-work. Two triggers exist purely to beat a name collision with a Cursor built-in — any PR-status request must route to pstack’s Babysit playbook rather than Cursor’s own babysit skill, whose description matches the same words.
The inline principles index. All twenty-three principle-* skills, grouped Core / Architecture / Verification / Delegation / Meta, each with its trigger condition in one line. The index is read at task start; the leaf SKILL.md is read in full only for a principle actually being applied. The non-negotiable at the top of the file closes the loop: name each principle that shaped a decision and the specific choice it changed, and cite only principles whose leaf you read this session. That citation requirement is what makes the principle set auditable rather than decorative — pstack’s analogue of a pattern-project-constitution, carried as skills rather than as a constitution file.
Autonomy, subagents, and reply style. Reversible work and external actions proceed without asking; irreversible writes always pause. Every Task call defaults to run_in_background: true, file pointers rather than inlined context, and an explicit model per role. The reply rules are unusually specific, banning the em dash outright and barring a colon as a mid-sentence connector, and they require every claim to carry its evidence or its label — measured, inferred, or guess — in the same sentence.
The twenty-three playbooks
Stored as separate files under playbooks/ and copied into the todo list verbatim rather than summarized, which keeps the step text out of the router’s own context until it is needed.
- Understand. Investigation (a read-only question with a cited answer as the deliverable).
- Diagnose. Bug fix, Perf issue, Hillclimb (sustained metric improvement with one commit per accepted win), Runtime forensics (a live symptom), Trace forensics (a captured profiling artifact). The two forensics playbooks deliver a diagnosis, not a fix.
- Build. Feature, Refactoring, Prototype, Visual parity.
- Meta. Authoring a skill, Eval (blinded testing of how a skill or prompt change moves agent behavior).
- Deliver. Babysit (drive a PR to merge-ready), Shipping (independently verify a green stack, then land only the contiguous verified run bottom-up), Opening a PR (invoked at the end of every other playbook).
- Run long. Autonomous run, Orchestrate (a standing multi-day program under one coordinator), Autopilot-full (independent PRs to merged, one owner each), Autopilot-stack (one linear stack for the operator to land), Multi-phase plan.
- Suspend and resume. Session pickup, Pause safely — an explicitly paired complement, and the wiki’s first framework to page suspension as its own procedure rather than only resumption.
- Housekeeping. Worktree cleanup.
The router scales ceremony to the work (pattern-scale-adaptive-planning): a large or cross-cutting effort routes to pstack-figure-it-out even when a narrower playbook fits, and a standing program routes to Orchestrate instead. figure-it-out designs one bespoke run; orchestrate runs the program.
See Also
- pstack-poteto-agent — the subagent that routes through the same wrapper; spawned for any delegate inside a playbook step.
- pstack-figure-it-out — the escape hatch when no bundled playbook fits.
- gstack-router · addy-using-agent-skills · sp-using-superpowers — the other framework routers.
- pstack — the framework this fronts.