BuilderOS

Formerly PLAID. BuilderOS is the successor to PLAID — Product Led AI Development. The PLAID skills have been refactored into standalone BuilderOS skills; new development happens here.

An operating system for builders. BuilderOS is a collection of agent skills that give product builders a repeatable system for ideating, designing, and building software products with AI — turning coding agents from autocomplete into disciplined collaborators that ship reviewed, tested work.

Why

AI coding agents are fast, but speed without discipline produces features that "compile" rather than features that work. BuilderOS encodes the habits of strong product teams — plan-driven work, mandatory review, end-to-end testing, honest reporting — as skills your agent follows automatically.

How it works

Each skill is a SKILL.md file that teaches an AI coding agent a workflow. Install the skills into your project (see Installation), then trigger them with natural prompts. Every skill is fully standalone — but they're designed to chain: each one writes its output as a document in your project's docs/ folder, and downstream skills pick those documents up automatically.

Ideate                Plan & Design              Build                  Launch
─────────             ─────────────              ─────────              ─────────
Idea Generator   →    Product Planner       →    Build Loop        →    Launch Checklist
Idea Validator        Design System              Design Better
   │                     │                          │                      │
   ▼                     ▼                          ▼                      ▼
docs/                 docs/                      working,               docs/
product-idea.md       product-vision.md          reviewed,              launch-checklist.md
validation-report.md  prd.md                     tested
                      product-roadmap.md         product
                      design.md

Skills

Ideate

Skill	What it does	Output
Idea Generator	Guided discovery of a product idea by mining what you already know or do — business or expertise. Captures context, synthesizes 3–5 candidate directions, scores them on a five-axis scorecard, and sharpens the winner.	docs/product-idea.md
Idea Validator	Pressure-tests an idea before you invest in building. Finds the core assumption, ranks fatal flaws, maps real competition (including "doing nothing"), plans your first 10 customers, defines a 2-week MVP test, and delivers a blunt strong / weak / pivot verdict.	docs/validation-report.md

Plan & Design

Skill	What it does	Output
Product Planner	A structured vision-intake conversation (8 sections, AI-suggested answers throughout) followed by generation of your three core product documents: strategy & brand, a coding-agent-ready technical spec, and a phased build plan with task checkboxes. Picks up docs/product-idea.md automatically if it exists.	docs/VISION.md, docs/product-vision.md, docs/prd.md, docs/product-roadmap.md
Design System	Translates images (screenshots, mockups, Figma URLs) into a design system in Google's open design.md format — YAML tokens plus prose rationale any coding agent can implement from, alongside a mirrored, self-contained design.html style guide that renders every token and component live for humans to read.	docs/design.md, docs/design.html

Build

Skill	What it does	Output
Build MVP	Executes the entire roadmap end to end: works through every task in docs/product-roadmap.md in order — implementing, testing, and verifying each before moving on — marking checkboxes and updating the status line until the magic moment works. Finishes by initializing git with an initial commit and offering to connect a remote repo. Agent-agnostic.	Working code, completed roadmap, initial git commit

For tighter, review-gated increments, use a Build Loop instead: nothing ships on "it compiles" — every increment is built → reviewed → tested end to end → fixed before the agent reports "done." Works from the Product Planner's roadmap or a direct prompt. Available in three flavors, adapted to each agent's native review tooling:

Skill	Agent	Review mechanism
Build Loop – Claude Code	Claude Code	/review, plus /security-review for sensitive surfaces
Build Loop – Codex	OpenAI Codex CLI	/review on uncommitted changes, plus a custom security pass
Build Loop – Cursor	Cursor	Cursor's /review

Trigger with: "run the build loop", "build the next task", "continue the plan", or "build this feature properly".

Whichever build path you take, pair it with the craft layer:

Skill	What it does	Pairs with
Design Better	A craft layer for generating or reviewing UI that's designed, not just functional — 50 numbered UX/UI heuristics across hierarchy, layout, typography, color & contrast, interaction, forms, the four data states, motion, accessibility (WCAG 2.2 AA), mobile/touch, cognitive load, and AI-product patterns, plus a pre-flight checklist. docs/design.md owns style (tokens); this skill owns craft. References design tokens by name and flags missing ones as New Patterns instead of inventing values. Standalone — falls back to the codebase's existing conventions when no docs/design.md exists.	docs/design.md, any Build Loop

Trigger with: "design better", "make this UI feel more designed", "apply design polish", or "review this for craft".

Launch

Skill	What it does	Output
Launch Checklist	Audits your actual codebase — stack, services, env vars, payments, deploy config — then writes a plain-English, step-by-step path from "works on my machine" to "customers can use it." Every step is marked 🧑 you / 🤖 agent / 🤝 together, with time estimates, costs, and a "you'll know it worked when..." check.	docs/launch-checklist.md

The docs/ folder

All skills read and write a shared docs/ folder at your project root. Run them in any order — each skill works alone, but when an upstream document exists, the next skill uses it to pre-fill its questions:

Document	Written by	Consumed by
product-idea.md	Idea Generator	Idea Validator, Product Planner
validation-report.md	Idea Validator	you
VISION.md	Product Planner (intake)	Product Planner (generation), Design System
product-vision.md	Product Planner	Design System, Build MVP, Build Loop, Design Better
prd.md	Product Planner	Build MVP, Build Loop
product-roadmap.md	Product Planner	Build MVP, Build Loop (progress tracked via checkboxes)
design.md	Design System	Product Planner, Build MVP, Build Loop, Design Better
design.html	Design System	you (human-readable mirror of design.md)
launch-checklist.md	Launch Checklist	you

Installation

BuilderOS uses the skills CLI. Run these from your project's root directory.

Everything in one go

npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os

Installs every BuilderOS skill at once. Use this if you want the full ideate → plan → design → build → launch pipeline.

Individual skills

npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/idea-generator
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/idea-validator
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/product-planner
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/design-system
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/build-mvp
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/build-loop-claude-code
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/build-loop-codex
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/build-loop-cursor
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/design-better
npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os/skills/launch-checklist

Every skill is fully self-contained — install just the Design System to turn a screenshot into design tokens, or just a Build Loop to execute a roadmap someone else wrote. You only need the Build Loop for the coding agent you actually use.

By skill name

npx skills add BuildGreatProducts/builder-os --skill product-planner

Manual installation

Clone this repo and copy the skill folders you want into your project's skills directory (e.g. .claude/skills/ for Claude Code).

Getting started

1. Install the skills (see above).
2. Start anywhere in the lifecycle:
   • Have nothing? → "help me find an idea"
   • Have an idea? → "validate my idea"
   • Idea validated? → "plan my product"
   • Have a reference design? → "create a design system from this image"
   • Docs ready? → "build my MVP" (whole roadmap) or "run the build loop" (task by task)
   • Building UI? → "design better" / "make this feel more designed"
   • Product built? → "create my launch checklist"

Changelog

See CHANGELOG.md.