What Is This?

Turbo covers the full dev lifecycle: reviewing code, creating PRs, investigating bugs, self-improving from session learnings, and more.

Five ideas shape the design:

1. Standardized process. Skills capture dev workflows so you can run them directly instead of prompting from scratch. /turboplan analyzes complexity and routes to the right mode. /finalize runs your entire post-implementation QA in one command. /investigate follows a structured root cause analysis cycle. The skill is the prompt.
2. Layered design. Skills compose other skills to any depth. /review-code security runs a single-concern scan. /review-code with no argument runs all six types in parallel. /polish-code loops format → lint → test → review → evaluate → apply → smoke test until stable. /finalize wraps the whole pipeline with self-improvement and commit. /audit fans out to all analysis skills in parallel, evaluates the combined findings, and produces a health report. Each pipeline composes with a natural, predictable interface. See The Turboplan Pipeline and The Finalize Pipeline for worked examples.
3. Swappable by design. Every skill owns one concern and communicates through standard interfaces. Replace any piece with your own and the pipeline adapts. See The Puzzle Piece Philosophy for details.
4. Works out of the box. Install the skills and the full workflow is ready. Dependencies are standard dev tooling (GitHub CLI, Codex) that most teams already have.
5. Just skills. No framework, no custom runtime, no new memory system. Skills are plain markdown that use the harness's native primitives (git, filesystem, built-in tools). Remove an independent skill and the rest still work.

The one thing beyond skills is each edition's ADDITIONS.md (e.g. claude/ADDITIONS.md), a small set of behavioral rules added to your harness's instruction file during setup. The most important one is Skill Loading: without it, the agent tends to skip reloading skills it has already seen in a session, which causes it to silently drop steps in nested pipelines like /finalize. The additions are kept in sync by /update-turbo. See claude/docs/skill-loading-reasoning.md for the full rationale (Claude-specific failure modes and mitigations; the Codex edition adapts the same rules in codex/ADDITIONS.md).

The other core piece is /self-improve, which makes the whole system compound. After each session, it extracts lessons from the conversation and routes them to the right place: project CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md, auto memory, or existing/new skills. Every session teaches the agent something, and future sessions benefit.

Works Best With

Turbo amplifies your existing process. It shines when your project has the right infrastructure in place:

• Tests — /finalize runs your test suite and reviews test coverage gaps. Without tests, there's no safety net. If your project doesn't have automated tests, /smoke-test can fill the gap by launching your app and verifying changes manually (it's part of the /polish-code loop), but real tests are always better. See Browser and UI Testing for the tools that power browser and native app verification.
• Linters and formatters — /finalize runs your formatter and linter before code review. If you don't have one, style issues slip through.
• Pre-commit hooks — /finalize commits your changes, which triggers any pre-commit hooks you have configured. Claude Code respects hook failures and fixes issues before retrying. If your project uses tools like husky, lint-staged, or pre-commit, Turbo works with them automatically.
• Dead code analysis — /find-dead-code (standalone skill, not part of /finalize) identifies unused code via parallel analysis, but it's even better when your project already has tools like knip, vulture, or periphery integrated.
• Dependencies — GitHub CLI powers PR operations. The Claude edition uses Codex for peer review; the Codex edition uses Claude for peer review. Everything works without peer review, but the full pipeline is better with it. See the edition setup guides for details.

Who It's For

The target audience is experienced developers who want to move faster without sacrificing quality. That said, beginners are welcome too. Turbo is a great way to learn how a professional dev workflow looks. Just don't blindly trust outputs. Review what Claude produces, understand why it made those choices, and build your own judgment alongside it.

If your plan is vague, your architecture is unclear, and you skip every review finding, Turbo won't save you. Garbage in, garbage out.

The Puzzle Piece Philosophy

Every skill is a self-contained piece. Pipeline skills like /finalize and /audit compose them into workflows, but each piece works independently too.

Want to swap a piece? For example:

• Replace /consult-oracle with your own setup (it's macOS-only and has a cookies workaround)
• Replace /commit-rules or /changelog-rules with your team's conventions. The pipeline adapts.
• Replace /code-style with your team's style guide. The built-in one teaches general principles rather than opinionated rules, so it's a natural swap point.

Skills communicate through standard interfaces: git staging area, PR state, and file conventions.

Sponsorship

If Turbo has helped you ship faster and you're so inclined, I'd greatly appreciate it if you'd consider sponsoring my open source work.

Quick Start

Prerequisites

Pick your edition: claude/SETUP.md for Claude Code, codex/SETUP.md for Codex. Both editions work best with their respective Max-tier plans (pipeline workflows are context-heavy). Additional tools are installed during setup.

External services: The Claude edition benefits from ChatGPT Plus or higher for Codex peer review. The Codex edition benefits from Claude Code access for Claude peer review. ChatGPT Pro or Business is useful for /consult-oracle, where Pro models are the only ones that reliably solve very hard problems. /peer-review and /consult-oracle are designed as swappable puzzle pieces, so if you don't have access, replace them with alternatives that work for you.

Automatic Setup (Recommended)

In Claude Code or Codex, prompt:

Walk me through the Turbo setup. Read SETUP.md from the tobihagemann/turbo repo and follow the guide for your edition.

The agent reads the root SETUP.md, picks the file that matches its harness (claude/SETUP.md or codex/SETUP.md), clones the repo, installs skills, configures the environment, and walks you through each step interactively.

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