cli-five

Code Like I'm Five — scaffold a 5-agent VS Code Copilot team into any repo.

Two ways to install

Full setup (recommended for teams)

npx cli-five init

Interviews you, scaffolds agents + memory files + stack-specific instructions, discovers skills from awesome-copilot and skills.sh, and tells you what to do next.

Quick plugin install (personal use)

copilot plugin install idusortus/cli-five

Installs the 5 agents to your Copilot profile. No project config, no interview — just the agents with the same autonomous contracts shipped by the scaffolded templates.

What you get

your-repo/
├── .github/
│   ├── agents/                  # 5 agents — Orchestrator delegates autonomously
│   │   ├── orchestrator.agent.md  # Routes tasks: Planner → Coder/Designer → Reviewer
│   │   ├── planner.agent.md       # Researches codebase, produces implementation plans
│   │   ├── coder.agent.md         # Writes production code, runs tests
│   │   ├── designer.agent.md      # UI/UX design, layouts, theming
│   │   └── reviewer.agent.md      # Code review, convention compliance
│   ├── copilot-instructions.md  # Persona + project mandates from interview
│   ├── instructions/            # Stack-specific coding guidelines
│   └── skills/                  # Installed skills from awesome-copilot + skills.sh
├── AGENTS.md                    # Tool-agnostic project context (agents.md standard)
├── PROJECT.md                   # Long-form vision (rarely changes)
├── STATE.md                     # Cross-session status (changes constantly)
├── decisions.md                 # Architectural decision log
├── agent-diary.md               # Append-only session log
└── histories/                   # Per-agent accumulated learnings

How it works

Select the Orchestrator agent in Copilot Chat and describe what you want. The Orchestrator autonomously calls Planner → Coder/Designer → Reviewer without any manual handoff clicks.

User: implement from plan.md
Orchestrator → [calls Planner] → [calls Coder] → [calls Reviewer] → done

No buttons. No "click here to continue". Just results.

The plugin agents and scaffolded .github/agents/*.agent.md templates are intentionally kept in sync. The repository test suite now checks that parity so the quick-install path does not quietly degrade.

Commands

npx cli-five init              # interview + scaffold + skill discovery
npx cli-five doctor            # validate an existing setup
npx cli-five list-stacks       # show detectable tech stacks
npx cli-five help

Flags

| Flag | Effect | |---|---| | --yes, -y | Accept interview defaults (overwrite gate still active) | | --force | Overwrite without confirmation (use with --yes) | | --dry-run | Print actions, write nothing | | --no-skills | Skip skills.sh discovery step | | --cost-mode <m> | Set cost mode: premium, cheap, or mixed | | --cwd <path> | Run against a different directory |

What init does

1. Detect — fingerprints stack (Node/TS, Python, .NET, Kotlin, Rust, Go, etc.). Brownfield-aware.
2. git init — if needed. Asks first.
3. Overwrite gate — double-confirms ("Proceed?" then "R U Sure?"). Only --force --yes bypasses.
4. Interview — name, one-liner, stack, frameworks, goals, constraints, cost mode, persona toggle.
5. Scaffold — writes 18 files. Substitutes answers into templates. Swaps model: per cost mode.
6. Skill discovery — the hero feature. Multi-source discovery from awesome-copilot (30k+ ★ community marketplace) and skills.sh. Color-coded recommendations, source attribution, multiselect install, and post-install breadcrumbs with copy-paste commands for the awesome-copilot suggestion skill and MCP server.
7. Custom instructions — generates stack-specific .instructions.md files for detected languages.
8. Next steps — tells you to open Copilot Chat, select Orchestrator, and start building. No button-clicking required.

Cost modes

| Agent | premium (1x–3x) | cheap (0x) | mixed | |---|---|---|---| | Orchestrator | Claude Sonnet 4.6 | GPT-4.1 | GPT-4.1 | | Planner | Claude Opus 4.6 | GPT-4o | GPT-4o | | Coder | GPT-5.3-Codex | GPT-4.1 | GPT-5.3-Codex | | Designer | Claude Opus 4.6 | GPT-4o | GPT-4o | | Reviewer | Claude Opus 4.6 | GPT-5 mini | Claude Opus 4.6 |

Override from CLI: npx cli-five init --cost-mode cheap Change anytime by editing the model: line in .github/agents/*.agent.md.

Required VS Code settings

{
  "chat.subagents.allowInvocationsFromSubagents": true
}

Skill discovery

cli-five searches two sources for skills matching your detected stack:

| Source | What it has | Stars | |---|---|---| | awesome-copilot | Skills, instructions, agents, plugins from the GitHub community | 30k+ | | skills.sh | Curated skill repos (Vercel, Anthropic, Microsoft, etc.) | — |

Recommendations show with source attribution. Only cli-five core skills are pre-selected; suggested skills from skills.sh and awesome-copilot require manual selection (press Space) before install. After installation, you get breadcrumbs for ongoing discovery:

Take time to read each installed skill so you understand what it does and can catch overlap or conflicts before they affect your workflow.

• Suggest skill — copilot plugin install awesome-copilot@suggest (AI-driven repo analysis)
• MCP server — awesome-copilot-mcp for programmatic search from any agent
• CLI browser — npx skills find for interactive search

What this is not

• Not a runtime. Once scaffolded, your repo doesn't depend on cli-five. You can uninstall the package and the agents still work.
• Not a workflow engine. No /plan-phase, no /ship, no 50 slash commands. Use /agent-customization in Copilot Chat to extend.
• Not Ralph. No issue-polling daemons, no autonomous loops, no crypto tokens.

Why the name

ELI5 → CLI5. Code Like I'm Five. Five agents. Get it? Yeah, it's a stretch. But the npm name was available.

Influences

• bradygaster/squad — see docs/squad-review.md
• burkeholland/ultralight — see docs/ultralight-review.md
• gsd-build/get-shit-done — see docs/gsd-review.md

Notes

• The plugin install path and the scaffolded project path are both supported and now validated against each other.
• npm test includes agent integrity checks in addition to the existing skill-step tests.

Local development

git clone https://github.com/idusortus/cli-five
cd cli-five
npm install
node bin/cli-five.mjs init --cwd /tmp/test-target

License

MIT.