cursor__plugins/pstack

pstack

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 everyday 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

make it yours

poteto-mode is my style. you may not want exactly that.

type /automate-me. it mines your recent transcripts, drafts a <your-name>-mode skill from how you've actually worked, and routes through pstack underneath. you keep pstack as the base and end up with your own routing skill alongside poteto-mode.

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.

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 seven playbooks. investigation, bug fix, perf, feature, authoring a skill, eval, and multi-phase plan. when invoked it:

1. opens a todo list. the first item is reading the inline principles index in the skill.
2. matches your task to a playbook and copies the steps in verbatim.
3. routes to the other skills as the steps fire.
4. writes unslopped replies.

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

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

the rest are useful when you want to specifically invoke them:

skill	use it when
/poteto-mode	default entry point for any non-trivial task.
/how	you want a walkthrough of how a subsystem works.
/why	you want to know why something was built this way. discovers available MCPs at run time and queries each evidence category in parallel (source control, issue tracker, long-form docs, real-time chat, infra observability, error tracking, analytics warehouse).
/architect	you're about to write code that crosses a function boundary and want the types and module shape settled first.
/arena	you want N parallel attempts at the same thing, then to grab the best parts of each.
/interrogate	you have a diff and want four different models to try to break it.
/automate-me	you want your own -mode skill, drafted from how you've actually worked.
/reflect	a long task landed and you want the recipe captured as a skill edit.
/tdd	you're fixing a bug and there's a cheap local test path. write the failing test first, then the fix.
/unslop	you're cleaning up writing. removes AI tells.

the poteto-agent subagent

pstack also ships a subagent that runs my style end to end. spawn it from a parent agent via subagent_type: "poteto-agent". it reads poteto-mode in full, including its inline principles index, before doing any work. substituting generalPurpose skips that read and drifts.

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

principles

eighteen 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.

• core: laziness-protocol, foundational-thinking, redesign-from-first-principles, subtract-before-you-add, minimize-reader-load, outcome-oriented-execution, experience-first, exhaust-the-design-space.
• architecture: boundary-discipline, type-system-discipline, make-operations-idempotent, migrate-callers-then-delete-legacy-apis, separate-before-serializing-shared-state.
• verification: prove-it-works, fix-root-causes.
• delegation: guard-the-context-window, never-block-on-the-human.
• meta: encode-lessons-in-structure.

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.
• /babysit and /create-skill are cursor built-ins.

install cursor-team-kit alongside pstack if you want the full set.

why are there no planning skills?

cursor already has a great plan mode which works great with pstack. but personally, i don't believe in planning. the best spec is code. if you do want to make a plan, /poteto-mode covers it, but it's not a default.

license

MIT