gstack-extensions

Personal skills layered on top of gstack, discovered by Claude Code alongside gstack's own skills.

Skills are organized into persona plugins: each persona is a Claude Code plugin installed from this repo's own local marketplace, and its skills invoke namespaced as <persona>:<skill> (for example /pm:bug, /design:pencil-mockup).

Install

git clone <this-repo> ~/dev/gstack-extensions
cd ~/dev/gstack-extensions
./bin/install

Then restart your Claude Code session. Skills become invokable as /pm:bug, /qa:browser, /eng:cr, /design:pencil-mockup, etc.

What's included

Five persona plugins (each a top-level dir with a .claude-plugin/plugin.json, a skills/ tree, and usually shared context):

• PM Penny (pm/): product-manager persona. /pm:feature, /pm:bug, /pm:next-issue, /pm:first-principles. Turns ideas, bug reports, and "what next?" into well-structured GitHub issues, and reframes problems from first principles.
• QA Quincey (qa/): manual-QA persona. /qa:browser, /qa:headless, /qa:qa-plan. Verifies one defined flow against the spec or mockup, in the browser (driving the gstack browse daemon, AI-comparing screenshots against Pencil mockups) or headless (capturing backend side effects), and authors the two-phase QA plan. Ships Quincey's enforcement hooks: the QA-plan gates (presentation / build / PR) and the QA-status Stop gate (see qa/README.md).
• Engineer Ernie (eng/): engineering persona. /eng:cr, /eng:cr-teammate, /eng:address-pr-feedback, /eng:pr-watcher, /eng:spike, /eng:coderabbit-config, /eng:shortcut. cr is his master code-review skill (the single local review path the ~/dev merge gate keys on); it routes to cr-teammate (review others' PRs), address-pr-feedback and pr-watcher (respond to feedback). Also spikes risky unknowns, configures CodeRabbit, and builds macOS Shortcuts. Ships Ernie's PR-lifecycle enforcement hooks: the ship-PR gate, the merge-clearance gate, the /ship sentinel, and the review stamp recorder (see eng/README.md).
• Designer Denise (design/): design persona. /design:pencil-mockup, /design:style-guide. The Pencil-native counterpart to gstack's HTML design skills: creates and updates .pen mockups on the canvas via the Pencil MCP, with a style guide frame as a first-class part of every mockup; style-guide owns the from-scratch questionnaire + research + generation flow.
• Marketing Mindy (marketing/): marketing persona. /marketing:copywriting, /marketing:copy-editing, /marketing:stop-slop, /marketing:copy-review-wip. Owns marketing surfaces; today the basket is copywriting (draft new copy, or review existing copy via the copy-review-wip front door that edits + de-slops in one pass), with room to grow into the wider marketing toolkit (CRO, ads, email, SEO). Three skills are vendored from third-party MIT repos (Corey Haines' marketingskills, Hardik Pandya's stop-slop) at pinned SHAs and patched for local voice rules; copy-review-wip is a first-party orchestrator over them. marketing/VENDORED.md carries provenance and the update play.

The persona name (Penny / Quincey / Ernie / Denise / Mindy) lives in each plugin's description and README as a memory hook; you invoke by the short role prefix, not the name.

How it works

./bin/install registers this repo as a local Claude Code marketplace (the root .claude-plugin/marketplace.json lists every plugin) and installs each plugin from it. Claude Code namespaces a plugin's skills as <name>:<skill>, where <name> is the plugin's manifest name (not the directory name). Each skill lives in <plugin>/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md and resolves sibling files (shared/*.md, references/) relative to its plugin root.

A plugin can also ship hooks (<plugin>/hooks/hooks.json, scripts under <plugin>/hooks/scripts/, referenced via ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}): Claude Code merges them at runtime while the plugin is installed, so a persona's enforcement gates activate and deactivate with the plugin itself, with no settings.json surgery. The qa and eng plugins use this for their QA-plan / QA-status and ship / merge-clearance gates. One exception needs a fixed path: /land-and-deploy (upstream gstack) calls merge-clearance.sh at ~/.claude/scripts/merge-clearance.sh, so bin/install writes a shim there that execs the newest installed eng plugin copy.

Installing copies each plugin into ~/.claude/plugins/cache/gstack-extensions/<name>/<version>/, so the repo is not read live: re-run ./bin/install (or bin/gstack-extensions-upgrade) to refresh the cache from the working tree, then restart the session. Because the plugins live in the plugin cache rather than in ~/.claude/skills/, they never collide on the filesystem with gstack's own skills: gstack's loose /qa and this repo's /qa:browser coexist cleanly (the : is what separates them).

This repo lives outside ~/.claude/skills/gstack/, so gstack-upgrade never touches it.

Earlier versions symlinked each plugin dir into ~/.claude/skills/. That only ever loaded as <name>@skills-dir and refused to load when a name collided with an installed plugin, so the marketplace install above replaced it. bin/install still sweeps any leftover symlinks from that layout.

Updating

Each skill checks on invocation whether this clone's main is behind origin/main (a TTL-gated git fetch, so it does not hammer the remote) and, if so, offers to upgrade. Accepting runs:

~/dev/gstack-extensions/bin/gstack-extensions-upgrade

which fast-forwards main and refreshes the installed plugins from the pulled source (uninstall+install, since claude plugin update no-ops while a plugin's version is unchanged). It refuses safely (and tells you why) if the clone is not on a clean main, so it never disrupts in-progress feature-branch work. Restart the session afterwards to load the refreshed skills. To upgrade by hand at any time:

cd ~/dev/gstack-extensions
git pull --ff-only   # must be on a clean main
./bin/install        # idempotent; refreshes the installed plugins

bin/gstack-extensions-update-check is the read-only check behind the prompt; it prints UPGRADE_AVAILABLE <n> <range> when behind and nothing otherwise.

Uninstall

./bin/uninstall

Uninstalls the five plugins and removes this repo's local marketplace (and sweeps any leftover symlinks from the old installer). Leaves gstack and any other marketplaces alone.

Adding to the repo

A new skill in an existing persona: create <plugin>/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md with valid frontmatter (name, description) and the standard "Update check (run first)" preamble (copy it from any existing skill). Re-run ./bin/install to refresh the plugin in the cache, then restart the session to register it. It invokes as /<plugin>:<slug>.

A new persona plugin: create <persona>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json (name is the only required field), put skills under <persona>/skills/<slug>/SKILL.md and shared context under <persona>/shared/, add a matching entry to the root .claude-plugin/marketplace.json (name + "source": "./<persona>"), then run ./bin/install and restart. bin/install discovers plugins from their manifests, so no installer edit is needed. It invokes as /<persona>:<slug>. Run claude plugin validate . --strict to check both manifests before installing.