gstack (Garry Tan)
github.com/garrytan/gstack · 71K stars (Apr 2026)
What it is
Section titled “What it is”A Claude Code skill pack from Garry Tan (YC president). 23 specialised slash commands cover the full SDLC: /office-hours, /plan-ceo-review, /plan-eng-review, /design-review, /review, /qa, /ship, /cso, etc. Each command activates a focused “specialist” persona within a single Claude Code chat session.
Core principles
Section titled “Core principles”- Role focus — each specialist has its own constraints and slice of the problem.
- Data flow control — what information passes between roles is governed.
- Quality gates — handoff points enforce standards.
- Boil the lake — each role finishes what it can do perfectly and skips what it can’t.
- Simplicity — push back against unnecessary complexity.
What we kept
Section titled “What we kept”- Boil the lake principle. Borrowed verbatim. Added to the prompts of the 5 roles most prone to sprawl: debugger, ui-qa, curator, product, architect.
- Plan-review structure. The spirit of
/plan-ceo-review(challenge the planner before any work) became ourplan-reviewerrole — but autonomous, gating, and integrated into the loop.
What we dropped
Section titled “What we dropped”- Slash-command-driven skill pack model. gstack lives inside a Claude Code chat session. A human invokes
/qawhen they’re ready. Our harness fires the equivalent autonomously. - 23 commands. Most of gstack’s commands are setup/installation/config (
/connect-chrome,/setup-deploy,/setup-gbrain,/learn,/freeze,/unfreeze,/gstack-upgrade). We don’t need these. /qavia real Playwright. We do real-browser QA viaverdict(lighter-weight CLI) instead.
Differences in philosophy
Section titled “Differences in philosophy”| gstack | Papercup |
|---|---|
| Human invokes specialists | Orchestrator invokes roles |
| Single Claude Code session | Per-role fresh context (subprocess) |
| Skills auto-trigger on Claude’s reasoning | Roles trigger on orchestrator decision verbs |
| 23 commands | 13 roles |
| Cross-team setup (“team mode”) | Per-mission isolation |
Honest take
Section titled “Honest take”gstack is excellent for what it is — a solo founder’s leverage tool inside Claude Code. The principles transfer beautifully to an autonomous loop, but the runtime model doesn’t. We took the principles, not the code.