When to use BOSS, and when to just talk to Claude
BOSS doesn't sit between you and Claude. You build exactly as you do now. The split is simple:
“How do I build this?”
No skill, no ceremony. That's most of your day, and BOSS stays out of it.
“Should I build this? Is it working? What did I decide?”
The seams between building, where things get lost.
While you're heads-down, BOSS does almost nothing. That's the design, not a gap.
Four rungs, and you unlock them
- Quickstart 4 on the team 15 skills
- MVP 11 on the team 39 skills
- V1 11 on the team 41 skills
- Scale 12 on the team 42 skills
You unlock each stop. Nothing is ever removed — the roster only grows.
Quickstart
Light idea capture: describe an idea, shape it, keep it — a product lead, a coder and a venture mentor, a canvas to pressure-test it and a conversation with a real person (either order), and a conscience that notices capturing without testing.
- arrives
product-leadcodermentor-founderprompt-coach
- the loop
/boss/idea/canvas/interview/pretotype/evidence
- also
/welcome/import/prototype/decide/sunset/persona/read-repo/feedback/boss-sync
- next
- When you're ready to actually build, switch to MVP mode:
boss unlock mvp.
Quickstart, in full: get the idea out of your head
Capture freely with /idea. Pressure-test one with /canvas,
filled a few cells at a time rather than all at once. You never pick a
framework: you answer questions, and the frame is a view you switch. The same
answers render as the Humane Product Canvas (the default), a Lean Canvas, or a
Business Model Canvas; /canvas --frame lean re-renders what you've
already said rather than interviewing you again, and a cell you haven't answered shows as
_(not yet)_ in every frame instead of quietly disappearing to make a view look
complete. A fourth frame, /canvas --frame onepager, folds the same answers
into the smallest thing you can hand to somebody outside, and it refuses to render at all
until at least one piece of evidence is on file.
Commercial prompts are folded into every cell (who exactly has the problem, what they use instead, who pays and why). And two questions ride along in all three frames, not just the humane one: who this could harm or exclude, and the principles you'll hold when holding them costs you something. Un-defaulting the framework was never meant to make those optional.
Then find out if it's real, which is the half that doesn't happen in the editor.
/interview preps one 15-minute conversation under Mom-Test discipline (past
behaviour, their life, no pitching) and debriefs your notes into graded records
afterwards. /pretotype builds the fake door: a real page you can put in front
of real people, published in one turn, so demand gets tested while it still costs an
afternoon. Both live here, at the first rung, because testing whether anyone
wants the thing is not an advanced move, and holding it back until MVP had it arriving
after the build it was meant to prevent.
Work out who it's for with /persona: your target user as a voice you can
actually consult, both to decide what to build and to react to what you built. It carries
a visible ledger of how much of that user is real evidence and how much is still a guess,
and it starts at all guess. It's a way to sharpen the questions you take to a
real person, never a way to skip them. Record what you learn with /evidence,
and what you chose with /decide. A project that lives here forever is a
legitimate project.
MVP
Ready to build the first working version: the spec convention, the smoke gate, the devlog and /close, the tester and the first mentors. The after-launch verbs arrive when a FEAT ships; the AI-cost set when the app first calls a model.
- arrives
testerplannermentor-architectmentor-customersmentor-cofoundermentor-capitaldesigner
- the loop
/spec/smoke/log/close
- also
/extract/drift-deep/revalidate/judge-traces/consult/red-team/practice/ship/design-review/comp-eval
- folded until a feature ships
/landing/health/onboard/roadmap/money/trust
- folded until the app calls a model
/ai-cost/ai-failure-states/evals
- folded until the app has a screen
/design-tokens-init
- next
- When you have real users and the app needs design rigor, a real db, and prototypes —
boss unlock v1.
MVP, in full: build the first working version
Adds the spec discipline (/spec, with validated-learning and evals fields) and
the smoke gate, the first rung where "is it alive?" becomes a gate rather than a habit.
Design tokens get scaffolded here too, the moment there's real UI, so
style never gets locked into code. The designer arrives with MVP —
one designer for both halves, what it looks like and what it does:
/design-review before the code, and again once there's a screen.
It's also where the questions start pointing outward. /comp-eval goes
and finds out who else is solving this (features, pricing, and the honest “why they might
win”), then keeps it as a living set you add names to, rather than a slide you drew once.
/roadmap weighs what to build next into a short bet-list with a
mandatory no-list, because a roadmap that only says yes isn't a decision.
Some verbs wait until they're earned. Retention, pricing, health and the first dollar
arrive once a feature has shipped; the AI-cost and failure-state set when your code
first calls a model; /design-tokens-init when there's a
screen. Until then they aren't in your slash menu at all, so a founder with one idea isn't
read a menu of verbs about pricing. And a project can end at any rung. /sunset
exists because quitting well is a skill, and a tool that only knows how to grow things is
lying to you about how this usually goes.
V1
Ready for a real, shippable v1: design-system enforcement, prototypes, the board, the design library, and the doc-placement contract.
- verbs
/board/design-library
- next
- When the team grows, the org gets real, and the product council needs to be a thing —
boss unlock scale.
V1, in full: make it shippable
V1 hires nobody. It's the one rung that adds no agents at all, and that's
deliberate. By now you have the team; what you don't have is a way to see what you've
already made. So it adds two views. /design-library generates a gallery of your
components, every variant, all five states, from your code, plus a reuse index the
agent reads before writing a new one. /board sequences work across features
instead of within one.
Scale
Customers are real, the team is growing, and coordination — not code — is the bottleneck: incident post-mortems, the customer register, and the org mentor.
- arrives
mentor-hiring
- verbs
/incident
- next
- There is no next unlock. From here the loop is: operate honestly, delegate deliberately, and let /extract carry what you've proven back UP (via
boss learn, where a checkout exists).
Scale, in full: grow it
Adds /incident. Deliberately thin: most projects should never need this rung.
Building with someone else
AI made each of you faster, which, left alone, makes a two-person team drift apart. You each work in your own AI session, ship in parallel, and quietly stop deciding things together. The uncomfortable part: that erosion is invisible from the inside. Teams that have already drifted still rate their teamwork as fine.
boss team add @their-handle lights up a shared place to decide
(/decide), a shared craft commons (/practice), and
mentor-cofounder, the one mentor that coaches the relationship. All of
it is dormant when you're solo. Keyed to GitHub handles: no accounts, no
seats, no server, no hierarchy.
- your ideas and the canvas
- your decisions and practices
- the devlog
- the venture brain's read on the project
Pushing your repo backs up your thinking and keeps your cofounder in the loop: same action, both jobs.
- the conscience's relationship notes
- what it said to you
- what you overrode, what it is holding back
Your cofounder never sees how often you have been nudged.
What the conscience watches, and what it won't
mentor-cofounder coaches dividing work across different skill sets, decision
rights, and the hard conversations about roles, pace and equity. It serves the partnership
as a unit and never takes a side.
If real work has happened and you have never recorded a single decision
together, the conscience says so once: "you've been building a while and haven't
decided anything jointly; are you two actually deciding this together, or in parallel?"
It notices that through the artifacts, an empty decision log, and never by asking
"how's your teamwork?", because self-report is precisely what is blind to this drift.
It is deliberately conservative, because a quiet decision log can just mean you decide on
a call; if that is you, boss conscience mute coordination and it stops. It
surfaces the seam. It never says whose fault it is, and it never scores your equity.
Two things
boss statusis the one command to remember. Come back after a week and it tells you where you are and what's next: you are here, the ladder, the one thing to pick up, and what you've actually learned so far. Its companion isboss recap, which reads the last week back out of your own records (landed / learned / decided / in flight) and says a section is empty rather than padding it.boss recap --mdif you need to paste it to someone.- The conscience is always overridable.
boss conscience pause --for 8hfor a sprint, ormute <moment>to turn down one nudge while the rest keep speaking. It never blocks.
The full guide
· and once BOSS is installed, boss help --html writes the whole thing as a
page for your project: every skill you actually have, the rungs you have not climbed
folded but searchable, and nothing you would have to keep up to date.