Ruthlessly clear PM mode for coding agents. The vest means you've shipped.
New here? Walk one feature end to end — setup to teardown in eight steps.
Install
Two commands. If your install needs a runbook, it has failed.
claude plugin marketplace add Websites-On-Computers/fleecevest
claude plugin install fleecevest@fleecevest
(Once published, the GitHub slug works in place of the path.) Or inside a
session: /plugin install fleecevest@fleecevest. Restart the session. It
activates on start, level full, no config needed.
Other editors and agents
Fleecevest lives in your workspace as a rules file and ships in platform-specific subdirectories. Pick it up automatically or point your tool to the right folder.
| Platform | Location | Auto-loaded |
|---|---|---|
| Cursor / Windsurf / Copilot / Cline / Kiro / agents.md | Rules in this repo | Yes |
| OpenCode | .opencode/command/ |
Point tool here |
| OpenClaw | .openclaw/skills/ |
Point tool here |
| Any MCP-speaking tool | fleecevest-mcp/ (see README) |
Configure MCP server |
All copies are generated — edit the canonical files and run npm run build. Never edit the copies directly.
Receipts
The vest works. The behavior benchmark measures whether the pose forces the clarity ladder: problem-first, kill criteria, one-page discipline. Run it anytime (npm run bench) to watch baseline and fleecevest compete on the same 15 checks — PRD, spec, and strategy asks. The results: baseline 7/15 — fleecevest 13/15 (full results).
See the examples: real product prompts, same shape before and after the vest, showing what changes when you ship with clarity first.
What it does
Fleecevest sits in front of every product artifact and runs the clarity ladder first: should this exist at all, is the problem one sentence with a named user, what's the evidence, what's the smallest bet that tests it, and what's the metric with a kill criterion. Only the rungs that hold get an artifact. Fail rung one or two and the recommendation is to kill it, in one line — that's a success state, not a bug.
Your tools, your routing
Fleecevest doesn't make you guess where an artifact lands. Declare it once
in docs/product/toolchain.md (project) or ~/.claude/fleecevest-toolchain.md
(you, everywhere) — project wins if both exist. Three stages, one line each:
draft is where thinking happens, open questions allowed. Final is
ladder-gated — no artifact claims its final destination until the clarity
rungs pass. Promote is the moment that gate gets enforced, not a formality
on the way out the door.
Fleecevest doesn't ship connectors — it uses the ones you have and can name the well-known one when you don't. The markdown stays the source of truth; it never pushes unasked.
Commands
| Command | What you get |
|---|---|
/fleecevest |
Switch or report intensity level (lite/full/ultra/off) |
/fleecevest-prd |
One-page PRD, clarity ladder enforced first |
/fleecevest-tickets |
Epics and paste-clean tickets from a PRD/spec |
/fleecevest-spec |
Project spec: milestones, owners, risks, kill criteria |
/fleecevest-eng |
Questions a PM should ask engineering before committing |
/fleecevest-review |
Tear apart an existing PRD/spec/ticket for clarity failures |
/fleecevest-discovery |
Interview guides, assumption maps, research synthesis |
/fleecevest-strategy |
Strategy one-pager: metrics tree, bets, a real not-doing list |
/fleecevest-comms |
Stakeholder updates and launch comms, answer first |
/fleecevest-toolchain |
Declare your team's tools, routing, and ticket policy |
/fleecevest-help |
This card, in the persona's voice |
Artifacts land in docs/product/.
Intensity levels
| Level | What changes |
|---|---|
| lite | Ladder advisory: flags vagueness, doesn't block on it |
| full | Ladder enforced. One-pager first. Kill criteria mandatory. Default. |
| ultra | One page is the maximum. Everything else is an appendix. Rung 1 asked out loud on every request. |
Switch with /fleecevest lite|full|ultra. /fleecevest default <level>
writes the choice to config so it survives restarts.
The knowledge base
The references fleecevest draws on are distilled from Lenny's Podcast transcripts — hundreds of episodes with working PMs and founders, condensed into eight files (PRD craft, discovery, strategy, prioritization, metrics, comms, operating habits, working with eng), each claim attributed to the person who said it. Not paraphrase-of-a-paraphrase — sourced, so you can go check.
Turning it off
Say "stop fleecevest", "take off the vest", or "normal mode". Resume anytime
with /fleecevest.
Credits
Pattern forked from Ponytail. Corpus from ChatPRD/lennys-podcast-transcripts. MIT licensed.
