A reusable, documentation-first development organization for Claude Code, packaged as a plugin. Six specialized roles move feature work from requirements to reviewed code:
Product Owner → product-manager → designer (UI features only) → principal-engineer (plan + ADRs + task breakdown) → senior-developer → reviewer → Owner approval, coordinated by an in-conversation orchestrator.
Owner attention is reserved for what matters — approving PRDs, releases, and major decisions (new dependencies, stack/data-model changes, security-sensitive or irreversible choices). All other gates are delegated: design specs → product-manager, plans and task breakdowns → principal-engineer self-certified; the product-manager answers requirement questions as the Owner's proxy.
Small work skips the pipeline entirely (fast path): bugs and chores go straight to the senior-developer (fix + tests + a record in docs/fixes/), doc corrections to the role owning the doc — no gates, as long as the work is truth-preserving.
Roles run inline by default. All work — questions, fast-path fixes, and full pipeline phases in linear sequence — runs in the main conversation by invoking the owning role's skill, at a fraction of a subagent spawn's token cost. Agents spawn only when it pays for itself: concurrency, independent review (pipeline reviews always run in the reviewer agent — fresh eyes), or context relief (handing a big phase to a fresh context).
Tasks are token-frugal by design: each feature's breakdown is a directory (docs/tasks/<slug>/) with a status index and one file per task, so an implementing session loads the tiny index plus only the task it is working on — never the whole plan. The backlog follows the same shape (docs/backlog/index.md + one file per item): any role files deferred work — scope cuts, tech debt, known bugs — and the product-manager prioritizes and promotes it into the pipeline or the fast path.
/plugin marketplace add J-T-McC/dev-team # private repo: SSH auth is used automatically
/plugin install dev-team@dev-team
Then scaffold the project workspace (creates docs/, seeds standards/stack, project CLAUDE.md section):
run the dev-team:bootstrap skill
Fill in docs/stack/stack.md and customize docs/standards/*.md — agents stop and ask rather than guess while placeholders remain. Commit the scaffolded files to your project repo. Nothing from your project ever flows back into this repo.
Adopting into an existing project? Bootstrap takes a second path (workflow/adoption.md): it surveys for collisions with your docs/ and CLAUDE.md first, then has the principal-engineer harvest the standards and stack from your codebase — manifests, CI, lint config, test layout, commit history — citing the file behind every line and leaving anything unevidenced as _TBD_; you approve. In-flight features enter at their true phase marked pre-adoption (upstream gates waived, downstream gates apply). Shipped work is never documented backwards — no retro PRDs, no retro ADRs. Documents are written forward, for the next change.
Keep the project CLAUDE.md lean — it is loaded every session, while skills and docs/ load on demand. The seed seeds/CLAUDE.project.md is the recommended shape.
Project-level skills (.claude/skills/) work out of the box: every dev-team agent carries the Skill tool and is instructed to consult relevant domain skills (e.g. a laravel skill) before deciding or implementing — no plugin changes needed.
/plugin marketplace update dev-team # refresh marketplace metadata from GitHub
/plugin update dev-team@dev-team # then update the plugin itself
Every commit to this repo is a new version (no version pinning). Seeded files (docs/standards/, docs/stack/, CLAUDE.md section) are project-owned and are not touched by updates — use the sync command below to catch up.
/dev-team:sync
Plugin updates never touch project-owned files, so a project bootstrapped before a seed was added (or extended) silently lacks it — and agents have no fallback to the plugin's copies. Run sync after updating; it is safe to run any time:
- Copies any seed file the project is missing (standards,
docs/stack/stack.md,docs/status.md,docs/backlog/index.md) and creates any missingdocs/directories - Reports drift in existing standards: lists seed sections (
##headings) absent from your project's copy, ignoring your customizations - Appends only what you approve — never overwrites, rewrites, or deletes project content
After a sync, fill placeholders in newly copied files and commit them to your project repo.
/plugin marketplace add /path/to/dev-team # local checkout as a second marketplace
# after edits:
/plugin marketplace update dev-team
/reload-plugins
Validate with claude plugin validate .
| Path | What | Updatable |
|---|---|---|
agents/, skills/ |
The six roles (orchestrator is skill-only) + bootstrap skill | ✅ via plugin update |
commands/ |
/dev-team:sync — pull missing/updated seeds into a project |
✅ via plugin update |
templates/, workflow/ |
Document templates, pipeline/handoff/communication rules | ✅ via plugin update |
hooks/ |
Session-start announcement + agent-memory size sentinel | ✅ via plugin update |
seeds/ |
Copied into projects by bootstrap/sync | ❌ project-owned after copy |
examples/user-authentication/ |
Worked example of the full pipeline | ✅ via plugin update |