groundwork

groundwork is a Claude Code plugin that makes an agent work the way Newman works. It ships /groundwork:newman-mode and /groundwork:reflect-newman-mode, and installs pstack and house-rules beside it.

flowchart LR
  G[groundwork] -->|depends on| P[pstack]
  G -->|depends on| H[house-rules]
  G --> S["/groundwork:newman-mode"]
  G --> B[Bash guards]
  S -->|layers on| PM["/pstack:poteto-mode"]

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• newman-mode covers how to ask questions, when to act without asking, design defaults, verification, briefing subagents and the stacked-PR process. It overrides poteto-mode where they conflict.
• reflect-newman-mode runs pstack's reflect over a session and turns the approved learnings into edits to newman-mode in the groundwork checkout.
• pstack provides the playbooks: poteto-mode, swarm, pause, orchestrate and the principle skills.
• house-rules blocks commits that break the commit-message preset and edits that add more than 5 comment lines per 100 new lines.
• Agents put cheaper models on cheaper work. worker is a copy of pstack's poteto-agent that hands back by about 40 tool calls. A hook tells worker to fold at 40 tool calls and junior at 30, and the caller escalates the receipt to a fresh, stronger agent. junior (Sonnet) takes mechanical leaves from worker and hands back at the first failure that has no one-line fix. git and tracker (Haiku) run git and issue-tracker operations whose inputs are already decided.
• Agent guard runs Explore on Sonnet and reroutes every pstack:poteto-agent spawn to groundwork:worker, and denies a junior spawn from anyone but worker. A pstack:poteto-agent or worker spawn without an explicit model is denied.
• Bash guards deny a piped command whose exit code would be hidden, and a slow or remote command (docker build, ssh, long runs) with no timeout.

Install

claude plugin marketplace add IniZio/groundwork
claude plugin install groundwork@groundwork

The groundwork marketplace lists pstack straight from cursor/plugins main, so the install pulls it in. If you already have pstack@cursor-plugins, uninstall it so the /pstack: skills load once.

house-rules needs Claude Code v2.1.193 or later.

Development

bun install
bun test

The groundwork marketplace can be a directory source pointing at a checkout, so every session runs the working tree. Skills and hooks reload with the reload-plugins command.