gstack-distilled

The strategy and decision-making frameworks from Garry Tan's gstack, as focused standalone skills.

What this is

gstack is Garry Tan's open-source Claude Code config — 60+ skills encoding how YC's president builds. The skills are large because they include their full operational layer: bash preambles, telemetry, gbrain memory sync, voice rules, model-specific patches, completion protocols.

This repo extracts the strategy and judgment layer on its own. Just the frameworks. No setup script, no install, no telemetry.

Useful when you want to:

• Read Garry's decision-making frameworks as plain markdown
• Drop a few focused skills into your own Claude Code setup
• Paste specific frameworks into any agent's system prompt

What's in it

Seven decision-making frameworks, each a standalone skill:

• what-to-build — YC office-hours' six forcing questions, the four CEO scope modes, anti-sycophancy rules, cognitive patterns
• estimate-and-scope — Boil the Lake, AI compression ratios, three layers of search, the eureka moment
• ship-discipline — The single ship gate, six auto-decision principles, the Confusion Protocol
• review-and-debug — Confidence calibration, root-cause iron law, alert-on-changes, the pre-existing blame protocol
• ux-bar — Krug's three laws, Goodwill Reservoir, eight DevEx first principles, time-to-hello-world tiers
• agent-management — User Sovereignty, agreement-as-signal, per-model overlays, measure-your-nudges
• learning-loop — Plan-tune dual-track profile, retro philosophy, the keep-or-toss test

Plus doctrine.md — the whole thing in one file for the impatient.

Install

Claude Code (plugin marketplace)

/plugin marketplace add 0xabrar/gstack-distilled
/plugin install gstack-distilled@gstack-distilled

This installs all seven skills as a managed plugin. Updates via /plugin update.

Cross-agent (skills.sh)

For Cursor, Gemini, or any agent that supports the Agent Skills standard:

npx skills add 0xabrar/gstack-distilled

Read or paste

Each skills/<name>/SKILL.md is plain markdown. Browse the repo, open doctrine.md for the single-file version, or copy any section into an agent's system prompt. The doctrine is model-agnostic.

Manual install (no plugin manager)

git clone https://github.com/0xabrar/gstack-distilled.git ~/.gstack-distilled
ln -sf ~/.gstack-distilled/skills/* ~/.claude/skills/

Update later with cd ~/.gstack-distilled && git pull.

Source and attribution

100% derived from gstack (MIT, © Garry Tan). Original frameworks, principles, and quoted text are Garry's. This repo organizes and condenses them.

Each skill file lists the gstack source files it harvests from. See ATTRIBUTION.md for the full mapping.

For the live tooling — the headless browser daemon, gbrain memory layer, multi-host installer, parallel-Conductor workflow — use gstack directly.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.