pbr

Context-engineered development workflow for Claude Code, Cursor, GitHub Copilot CLI, OpenAI Codex, and Google Jules.
Build ambitious multi-phase software without quality degradation.
Works with any Claude Code plan. Shines on Max. Now available for Cursor IDE and GitHub Copilot CLI.

Why Plan-Build-Run? • Getting Started • Commands • How It Works • Local LLM • Wiki • Contributing

The Problem

Claude Code is remarkably capable...until your context window fills up. As tokens accumulate during a long session, reasoning quality degrades, hallucinations increase, and the model starts losing track of earlier decisions. This is context rot, and it's the primary failure mode when building anything beyond a single-session project.

Plan-Build-Run solves this. It keeps your main orchestrator under ~15% context usage by delegating heavy work to fresh subagent contexts, each getting a clean 200k token window. All state lives on disk. Sessions are killable at any second without data loss. Whether you're on a free tier or Max 5x, wasted context means wasted budget, and context rot is the biggest source of waste.

Why Plan-Build-Run?

Most AI coding tools treat context as infinite. They index your codebase, track your edits, and hope the model keeps up. That works for single-file changes. It falls apart when you're building something that takes days, spans dozens of files, and requires decisions made on Monday to still hold on Friday.

Plan-Build-Run takes a different approach: structured context isolation. Instead of stuffing everything into one session, it delegates each operation to a fresh subagent with a clean 200k token window and coordinates through files on disk.

Goal-backward verification, lifecycle hooks, wave-based parallelism, kill-safe state, and local LLM offloading to cut frontier token costs on routine tasks. See What Sets It Apart for the full comparison and differentiators.

When to use Plan-Build-Run: Multi-phase projects where quality matters. New features spanning 5+ files, large refactors, greenfield builds, anything that would take more than one Claude Code session to complete. Use depth: quick or depth: standard to control agent spawn count per phase.

When to skip it: Single-file fixes, quick questions, one-off scripts. Use /pbr:quick for atomic commits without full workflow overhead: single executor spawn, no research or verification agents.

Works on every Claude Code plan. Use depth: quick on Free/Pro, depth: standard on Max, depth: comprehensive on Max 5x. See What Sets It Apart for tier-specific guidance.

Getting Started

Prerequisites