Start alone. Scale to a team. The context never dies.
You open a new session. You tell the AI to be your product manager. Then your architect. Then your developer, tester, and reviewer, all in the same conversation, all at once. And it tries. It really does. But it's juggling five jobs with no structure, and something always slips. An edge case the PO should have caught. A test that never got written. A review that missed the obvious thing.
This isn't an AI problem. It's a structure problem.
The Fix: Five Roles, Not Five People
contextkit is built around a simple idea: the best way to build something is to think about it in distinct roles, in sequence, with each role fully informed by the one before it.
Its Squad workflow gives you five specialized commands, each representing a role:
-
/squad: Product Owner -
/squad-architect: Architect -
/squad-dev: Developer -
/squad-test: Tester -
/squad-review: Reviewer
You don't need five people. One person can run all five. The discipline of switching roles is what forces you to catch things you'd miss if you just dove straight into code.
And everything flows through a single shared file: .contextkit/squad/handoff.md.
How It Works: One File Carries Everything
When you run /squad "add a user authentication flow", contextkit creates the handoff file and the Product Owner role writes into it: the user story, acceptance criteria, edge cases, and what's explicitly out of scope. That's the spec. It stays in the file forever.
Then /squad-architect reads that spec and writes its own section: the technical approach, which files to change, the trade-offs, the steps in order.
Then /squad-dev reads the architect's plan and implements. Every decision made along the way gets documented in the handoff.
Then /squad-test reads the acceptance criteria and the implementation. Writes and runs tests against both.
Then /squad-review reads everything and gives a PASS or NEEDS-WORK verdict with specific notes.
No role starts cold. No context is lost. Each role inherits everything the previous one knew.
Why This Makes You Better Solo
When you wear all five hats in a single AI session, you tend to skip the uncomfortable parts. The architect in you gets impatient and jumps to code. The developer in you doesn't want to write tests. The reviewer in you is too close to the work to see the gaps.
Squad forces you to slow down at each stage, think from one perspective at a time, and document what you found before moving on. The result is work that's more complete, more reasoned, and easier to revisit.
The handoff file becomes your own second brain for the task. When you come back tomorrow, or next week, you don't re-read the codebase. You open the file and know exactly where things stand.
Use the Right Model for Each Role
Not every role needs the same horsepower. A reviewer reading a complex spec might warrant your most capable model. A developer grinding through implementation steps can run on something faster and cheaper.
Squad's config.md lets you configure this:
# .contextkit/squad/config.md
checkpoint: po
model_routing: true
With model_routing: true, /squad-auto automatically routes Dev and Test phases to Claude Haiku, saving roughly 35% on tokens, while keeping Architect and Review on your primary model. You get the right intelligence at each step without overpaying for it.
And When You Want to Bring Someone Else In
Here's where it gets powerful beyond solo work.
Because the handoff file is plain markdown, it's completely portable. Any developer, any AI tool, any teammate can open it and contribute to the next role.
You could run the PO spec yourself in Claude Code, then send the file to a senior engineer who does the architecture in Cursor. A junior dev picks up the implementation. QA runs the tests. Anyone does the review.
No re-prompting. No "let me explain the project." No "what did we decide about the database?" It's all in the file. It was always in the file.
The same structure that makes you better as a solo developer becomes the coordination layer for your entire team, with zero extra setup.
Run It Your Way
Run /squad "add user authentication" and then /squad-auto. The pipeline writes the spec, designs the architecture, implements the code, runs tests, and delivers a verdict. Hands-free.
/squad "add user authentication" # PO writes the spec
/squad-auto # Architect → Dev → Test → Review, hands-free
Want to step through manually or run batch tasks across multiple features? The docs cover it.
When Something Doesn't Add Up
Real work isn't linear. Any role can raise a question for an upstream role. The pipeline pauses, you answer it, you re-run the command to continue. Nothing gets silently skipped. Every question and answer lives in the handoff file. The trace is complete.
The Real Shift
Most developers using AI work in isolated sessions: private, fragile, starting from scratch every time.
Squad makes your context durable and portable. It lives in a file that survives session resets, tool switches, and handoffs between people. Start alone, scale to a team. The file travels with the work.
One developer can think like five specialists. Five developers can work like one team.
That's the shift.
Get Started in 60 Seconds
1. Install the CLI
npm i -g @nolrm/contextkit
2. Set up your project
cd your-project
contextkit install
This creates a .contextkit/ folder with skeleton standards files. After setup, run /analyze in your AI tool: it scans your codebase and fills those files with your project's actual conventions: naming patterns, architecture decisions, tech stack specifics. From that point on, every AI session starts with full project context already loaded.
3. Start your first Squad task
/squad "your task here"
The handoff file is created. The PO spec is written. You're off.
- npm: npmjs.com/package/@nolrm/contextkit
- GitHub: github.com/nolrm/contextkit
- Docs: contextkit-docs.vercel.app/docs/squad
Written by Marlon Maniti
I got tired of re-explaining my codebase to AI tools every session. contextkit is what I built to fix that. If you're using AI to ship software, this is for you.
Follow me for more on AI-native dev workflows. If this saved you from one lost-context session, hit the clap button.
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