EvanFlow: 16 Claude Code skills wired into a TDD loop
Just landed on Hacker News today: EvanFlow, a single repo that bundles 16 Claude Code skills into a coherent TDD-driven workflow. Brainstorm → plan → execute → tdd → iterate. Each phase is its own skill with explicit checkpoints, and the agent is wired so it can't auto-commit and can't skip verification. The whole thing installs in one shot via the new Claude Code plugin marketplace: /plugin marketplace add evanklem/evanflow.
The shape matters more than the feature list. The 16 skills break into three tiers: a default 5-skill loop (brainstorming, writing-plans, executing-plans, tdd, iterate) that handles the 80% case. Eight special-purpose skills for things like glossary extraction, architecture refactoring, parallel constraint-based interface design, root-cause debugging, bidirectional code review, PRD synthesis, and conversational QA. Three meta-skills (compact, an index, plus a single-entry orchestrator called evanflow-go) that hold the rest together. The iterate skill caps itself at 5 self-review rounds — somebody clearly burned context on infinite loops before settling on this number.
Why it lands. EvanFlow is the cleanest implementation yet of "skills as the unit of agent workflow" — a thesis that's been building for two weeks. Anthropic's Skills launch, Karpathy's skills repo, mattpocock's skills, ComposioHQ's awesome-codex-skills, Google's agents-cli, the Krakow Skills-Driven Workflows paper, and now EvanFlow taking the next step: skills are no longer a curated list, they're a graph with vertical-slice TDD as the spine and explicit handoffs between phases. The fact that this fits in a single GitHub repo with one install command is the editorial point — the format is converging fast.
The practical takeaway for builders: if you're still writing custom prompts for each phase of your dev loop, you're three weeks behind. The center of gravity for Claude Code customization has moved from prompts to skills, and the skills market has moved from individual files to opinionated, end-to-end workflows. EvanFlow is what "opinionated" looks like: TDD discipline, vertical slices, no auto-commit, capped iteration. If you don't agree with those choices, fork it — that's the design.
Repo: github.com/evanklem/evanflow. Plugin install: /plugin marketplace add evanklem/evanflow. CLI install: npx skills@latest add evanklem/evanflow -s '*' -y.
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The shape matters more than the feature list. The 16 skills break into three tiers: a default 5-skill loop (brainstorming, writing-plans, executing-plans, tdd, iterate) that handles the 80% case. Eight special-purpose skills for things like glossary extraction, architecture refactoring, parallel constraint-based interface design, root-cause debugging, bidirectional code review, PRD synthesis, and conversational QA. Three meta-skills (compact, an index, plus a single-entry orchestrator called evanflow-go) that hold the rest together. The iterate skill caps itself at 5 self-review rounds — somebody clearly burned context on infinite loops before settling on this number.
Why it lands. EvanFlow is the cleanest implementation yet of "skills as the unit of agent workflow" — a thesis that's been building for two weeks. Anthropic's Skills launch, Karpathy's skills repo, mattpocock's skills, ComposioHQ's awesome-codex-skills, Google's agents-cli, the Krakow Skills-Driven Workflows paper, and now EvanFlow taking the next step: skills are no longer a curated list, they're a graph with vertical-slice TDD as the spine and explicit handoffs between phases. The fact that this fits in a single GitHub repo with one install command is the editorial point — the format is converging fast.
The practical takeaway for builders: if you're still writing custom prompts for each phase of your dev loop, you're three weeks behind. The center of gravity for Claude Code customization has moved from prompts to skills, and the skills market has moved from individual files to opinionated, end-to-end workflows. EvanFlow is what "opinionated" looks like: TDD discipline, vertical slices, no auto-commit, capped iteration. If you don't agree with those choices, fork it — that's the design.
Repo: github.com/evanklem/evanflow. Plugin install: /plugin marketplace add evanklem/evanflow. CLI install: npx skills@latest add evanklem/evanflow -s '*' -y.
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