fleecevest

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.

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

Artifacts land in docs/product/.

Intensity levels

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.