Mirror of cursor/plugins/pstack — kept in sync for standalone use. See also backnotprop/bro, referenced by the /bro skill below.

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

get started

two steps:

1. run /setup-pstack and choose which models you want.
2. use /poteto-mode whenever you’re doing anything that requires rigor.

new here? the pstack guide walks you through a first real task, from setup and prompting through verification and overnight runs.

that’s it. the other skills are situational; the mode skill uses them for you as needed. out of the box the mode splits work by model strength: precisely-specified code goes to sol, fast mechanical code goes to grok, and prose and judgment go to fable. the default panel is fable / sol / grok / opus 5. /setup-pstack changes any of it.

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 twenty-two playbooks:

/poteto-mode this pr has a subtle bug where the scroll drifts every 750ms even when idle. repro
first, then fix and verify.

/poteto-mode i'm going to bed. land the stack even if ci flakes. i want everything merged by
morning.

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 framed for the consumer and the maintainer.

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

/poteto-mode is also a sticky mode: 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. opt out any time by saying so.

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

skills

/poteto-mode runs most of these for you when a step needs them (how, why, architect, arena, swarm, interrogate, unslop, no-comments, technical-writing, tdd, and the principles). the table below is for when you want one directly:

/how do we cancel runs? do we have an n+1 when we look up every run to cancel?

/interrogate review this pr.

examples

mostly i type /poteto-mode at the start of a task and let it route to a playbook. the other skills fire as the steps need them. a few i reach for directly.

the poteto-agent and Comment Sicko subagents

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.

pstack also ships Comment Sicko, a read-only comment reviewer available as subagent_type: "Comment Sicko". usually invoke it through /no-comments, not directly.

principles

twenty-one 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.

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.
• /create-skill is a cursor built-in. cursor also ships a built-in /babysit; inside poteto-mode, the babysit playbook supersedes it for pr-status requests.

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.

make it yours

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

type /automate-me. it mines your recent transcripts, drafts a -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.

models are configurable too. type /setup-pstack. it detects the models you have access to and writes a small always-applied rule mapping each role (code, judgment, the review panels) to a model. every skill reads it and falls back to sensible defaults when the rule is absent, so you override only what you want.

automations

pstack also ships a dormant benny automation pack. benny triages slack issue reports, then reproduces and fixes confirmed bugs with real ui evidence. its files are not registered as slash skills.

to set it up, point cursor at FOR_AGENTS.md. setup copies the pack into the target repository at .cursor/automations/benny/, enables pstack there for shared skills, and keeps user configuration outside the copied pack.

license

MIT