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Accelerator

Getting Started

This tutorial installs Accelerator and walks you through your first full loop — research → plan → implement — on a small change in one of your own repositories. By the end you will have a research document, a reviewed plan, and an implemented change, each captured as a file under meta/ rather than lost in a conversation.

Prerequisites

Section titled “Prerequisites”
  • Claude Code v2.1.144 or later — earlier versions lack the subagent skill-preload mechanism the plugin relies on.
  • macOS or Linux. The shell tooling and the visualiser binary target both; jq is required by the session hooks and integrations.
  • A git (or jj) repository to work in — any project will do.

Install and initialise

Section titled “Install and initialise”

  1. Add the marketplace and install the plugin. In Claude Code:

    /plugin marketplace add atomicinnovation/accelerator
    /plugin install accelerator@atomic-innovation

    Restart the session so the plugin’s hooks and skills load.

  2. Prepare the repository. From a session in your repo:

    /accelerator:init

    This creates the meta/ directory tree the skills write to (plans, research, work items, decisions, reviews, …) plus an .accelerator/ scaffold for configuration, and gitignores the personal config file. It is idempotent — and optional, since skills also create directories on first use. See The meta/ directory for what lives in each subdirectory.

  3. (Optional) Add project context. Run /accelerator:configure create to record your stack, conventions, and build commands in .accelerator/config.md; every skill reads it at invocation time. The configuration cookbook has ready-made recipes.

Your first loop

Section titled “Your first loop”

Pick a small, real change — the example below adds input validation to a signup form. The point of the exercise is watching each phase hand off to the next through a file, not the change itself.

  1. Research. Ask a question about the code the change will touch:

    /accelerator:research-codebase how is the signup form validated today?

    Claude decomposes the question and spawns parallel subagents — locators to find the relevant files, analysers to read them — then synthesises what they return. You will see something like:

    Research complete. Findings written to meta/research/codebase/2026-07-10-signup-form-validation.md. Key findings: validation is client-side only in SignupForm.tsx:42; no server-side checks exist…

    Open the document: it contains the findings with file-and-line references. Ask follow-up questions now if anything is unclear — they are appended to the same file.

  2. Plan. Start a plan from that research:

    /accelerator:create-plan add server-side signup validation

    This is a conversation, not a one-shot generation. Expect the skill to push back and ask before it writes anything:

    Before drafting the plan I need to resolve a few things the research couldn’t answer:

    1. Should validation errors reuse the existing client-side message copy, or is new copy acceptable?
    2. …

    Once you have agreed the approach and phase structure, the plan is written to meta/plans/2026-07-10-add-server-side-signup-validation.md with status: draft — phases, specific file changes, and success criteria split into automated and manual verification.

  3. Review the plan (recommended). Before any code exists is the cheapest moment to change course:

    /accelerator:review-plan @meta/plans/2026-07-10-add-server-side-signup-validation.md

    Parallel reviewer agents examine the plan through quality lenses (architecture, correctness, test coverage, code quality) and record a verdict — APPROVE, REVISE, or COMMENT — in meta/reviews/plans/. Address the findings and re-run until it earns APPROVE.

  4. Implement. You can do this in a brand-new session — the plan file carries all the context:

    /accelerator:implement-plan @meta/plans/2026-07-10-add-server-side-signup-validation.md

    The skill works phase by phase, pausing after each one for your review and ticking success criteria off in the plan file itself:

    #### Automated Verification:
    - [x] Unit tests pass: `npm test`
    - [x] Type check green: `npm run typecheck`

    If it is interrupted, re-running resumes from the first unchecked item.

  5. Commit and finish. Run /accelerator:commit to turn the session’s changes into well-formed atomic commits, then optionally /accelerator:validate-plan to verify the code matches the plan (a pass marks the plan done), and /accelerator:describe-pr when you raise the PR.

Watch it as a website

Section titled “Watch it as a website”

Your meta/ documents are plain markdown, but the plugin ships a visualiser that renders them as a live local site — plans, research, and a work-item kanban board:

/accelerator:visualise

Where next

Section titled “Where next”