pstack turns Cursor into a rigorous engineering workflow with playbooks, specialist skills, multi-model review, and runtime verification.

Flavio Copes

pstack is a Cursor plugin created by Lauren Tan (poteto) that turns AI coding agents into a structured engineering workflow with 23 workflow skills, 21 engineering principles, 22 task playbooks, and 2 specialized subagents. The central command /poteto-mode routes a request to the right playbook (bug fix, feature, refactor, investigation, perf), copies it verbatim into a task list, and enforces runtime verification rather than accepting a passing build as proof. Other skills include /how and /why for tracing system behavior and history, /architect and /arena for design exploration, /swarm for parallel coverage work, /interrogate for multi-model code review, and /automate-me and /reflect for personalizing and refining the workflow over time. The piece walks through installation, architecture, playbook categories, verification skill generation, overnight autonomous runs, and common mistakes, plus the author's own take on when pstack is worth the overhead versus a lighter workflow like fstack.

A deep dive into pstack

Verification is a first-class part of the workflow