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coordinator-claude

A PM-native operating layer for AI engineering work. An opinionated Claude Code plugin that turns product intent into scoped plans, delegated implementation, evidence, and ship/no-ship decisions. You're PM. Claude is EM. You stay technical enough to spot when something's wrong; the EM handles the rest.

Who This Is For

You don't need to write code. You need to know enough to evaluate it — to spot when something smells wrong, to ask the right questions, to set direction. Amjad Masad (Replit's founder) opined that people who don't program may actually be better positioned for the LLM-coding world: they won't micromanage implementation. This plugin leans into that. It gives Claude standing authority to make engineering decisions — how to build, who to delegate to, when to refactor — while you hold product authority: what to build, what to cut, what ships. Just like an EM-PM dynamic.

This isn't a collection of prompt tricks. It's a decision architecture: routines (session orientation, plan review, multi-source code review, structured handoffs, daily flows) plus authority boundaries (EM owns implementation, PM owns scope/ship) plus reviewer personas that push back with fix-gates between them. Reviews are meaningful — blocking findings, not theatre. And the system actively reads its own accumulated wikis and lessons before drafting new plans (prior-art-checker pre-flight, /learn-lessons triage), so the scar tissue from past decisions informs the next one rather than sitting in a write-only memory file. It maps to how PM-EM collaboration actually feels in a real engineering team. The difference is that your "team" can work autonomously for hours, and you can review the output when you're ready.

What This Is Not

• Not another agent framework. Claude Code already has subagents, plugins, skills, hooks, and MCP. This sits on top of that infrastructure — it doesn't compete with it.
• Not a PRD-to-code pipeline. Product intent is captured inside plan mode and acceptance criteria, not in a separate PRD funnel.
• Not an autonomous coding agent. The PM is in the loop on scope, tradeoffs, and ship decisions by design. Autonomous modes (/mise-en-place, /autonomous) exist for execution sprints, not for product authority.
• Not a developer productivity tool. The target user evaluates engineering work — they don't write it. If you want to be more productive at writing code yourself, you want vanilla Claude Code; this is for managing AI engineering work, not doing it.
• Not aimed at the fully non-technical PM (yet). The current sweet spot is a technical-evaluating PM — someone who reads diffs, watches for code smell, and recognizes odd choices. A higher-altitude "I trust the EM and only review outcomes" mode is plausible for simpler projects with strong guardrails, but it's an aspiration, not a current default. Complex codebases require a PM who can tell when something looks wrong.

Quick Start

You don't install this. Your agent does. Open Claude Code in any project and paste:

Install coordinator-claude. The playbook is at
https://github.com/dbc-oduffy/coordinator-claude/blob/main/docs/agent-install.md
— read it, follow it, and queue /project-onboarding as the immediate next step
after I restart Claude Code.

Claude clones the repo, runs the installer, validates the result, and tells you when to restart. After restart, /project-onboarding bootstraps tracking infrastructure in your project.

Auditing & uninstall → docs/safety.md — what the installer changes, what it does not do, audit commands, and exact uninstall steps.

Compatibility

coordinator-claude	Claude Code	OS tested	Notes
v2.0.0	tested with Claude Code 2026-05-07 release; minimum version not formally established	macOS, Linux, WSL, Windows (Git Bash)	Reference: setup/install.sh. v2.0.0 has breaking changes — see CHANGELOG.

How a Session Works

Most tools hand you a bag of commands and wish you luck. This system has routines — things that happen automatically because they should always happen, woven into the session lifecycle so you don't have to remember them.

Starting up. When Claude opens a supported project, a SessionStart hook fires automatically — loading the current branch, pending handoffs, lessons from past sessions, project vitals, and an orientation cache. No cold start. Claude lands in the middle of the context window where performance is strongest, with forward-looking state already loaded. This is deliberate: research shows LLMs degrade toward the end of their context and, to a lesser extent, at the beginning (Liu et al. 2023, "Lost in the Middle"). The orientation hook front-loads context so the working session occupies the optimal window.