We've started to be an early user in December and have since adopted it in a brown field codebase. I'd describe this as Lovable 2.0 or vibe coding 2.0. The p0 workflow allowed us to delegate medium to complex full features to Claude Code while staying in lane with our standards. It allows us to go from idea to fully working prototype and PR within half and hour to hour, most of the time fully hands off. PRs still need to be reviewed for production. However p0 allowed to drastically improve per engineer velocity, AI code quality and iterate faster with working prototypes and refinements.

Compared to Claude Code directly, which we also use heavily, p0 keeps very strong coherence from user story, spec planning, architecting, engineering and QA - across many several agents and subagents. Breaking down the work into sequential and parallel task. With Claude Code alone this would be usually requiring lots of hand holding, or be be only partially focussed, rest lost in the woods. Also, we attempted to replicate some of p0 ideas with home grown software dev personas and workflows which fell apart. I think the strong point of p0 is that they really nailed the decomposition and software dev cycle with agents.

Really recommend to try, and at the very minimum you get to make your codebase agent ready if you haven't already.

The real unlock here isnt the multi-agent orchestration, its the standards layer. Every team ive seen try to scale AI coding hits the same wall: Claude is brilliant until it isnt, and it isnt brilliant when it doesnt know your patterns. A single CLAUDE.md ages fast and never captures the insitutional stuff that lives in senior engineers heads. The 15 minute intervew to generate repo standards is the part id want to stress-test. Thats the moat, if it holds up. How does it handle standars drift as the codebase evolves? Does the agent actively flag when new PRs diverge from documented patters, or is it purely generation-side?

When you build features with p0, it suggests keeping the standards updated. We plan to tie this more into git hooks so that we can do this on code merges and not rely on it client side.

The standards are synced across the team but you need to use p0 to make full use of them, or at least re-import them into a custom harness.

Slightly disagree on the orchestration. It's not unusual for AI native solo devs to have some self-made harness, but most teams don't have that, and don't have the time to make one. Claude Code etc. only ships the primitives. With p0 you get one out of the box that we have been and keep tweaking.

Git hooks for standards updates sounds clean but sidesteps the hard part. Knowing when to update is trivial - knowing what to update to is the actual problem. If the AI decides what goes into the standards file, you're trusting it to know what it doesn't know yet. That's circular.

Subtraction is the new addition. As the cost of writing software drops, it’s so easy to just keep adding stuff. p0 takes kind of the opposite and refreshing approach. it forces you to focus on the fundamentals. What should we actually build? What’s truly essential and core? What can we ruthlessly cut? It directs you to think deeply instead of just vibing and shipping. Really appreciate that discipline.

Sounds great! I heard about the product two weeks ago, but unfortunately didn't have enough information. This week, I received a request to build an interface as a non-technical person. I'm definitely going to try it with purple!

If the implementation is successful, I'll get paid. Wish me luck! :)

Sounds interesting, but can't find pricing information anywhere ?

Only: > We offer a subscription model per team. Token costs for AI models (Claude, etc.) are paid directly via your own Claude subscription or API keys. Reach out for specific pricing based on your team size.

Is it "free" for single developer workflows ?

Sorry, the link is hard to find on mobile: https://www.bepurple.ai/pricing

Technically that's not really a pricing page -- it just says "reach out for pricing." So the link exists but shmoogy's point still stands. IIRC a pricing page usually has, you know, actual prices on it.

I first tried p0 about a month ago. What stood out to me was the way the repo onboarding is designed. The harness puts you through a 15 minute Q&A to generate "standards" that it then keeps in sync with the codebase. IMO that is the best implementation of self-generating repo rules I have seen.

The Q&A-to-standards approach is smart because it captures institutional knowledge before it gets lost. We spent months writing ours by hand and they still don't fully reflect how we actually work. If this keeps them in sync automatically, that's the hard part nobody's really solved well yet.

Thank you, and also good luck with your HN launch of BrowserBrawl today!

Worked great for me. Think about integrating the /counselors skill so you can fan out complex questions to multiple hq models across Opus, Gemini, and Codex. We're using it to do extensive design/performance/SEO audits that benefit from multiple smart opinions.

Andres from the P0 team here. I worked on that part, glad it worked well for you.

You can use any skill you’d normally add to Claude Code locally, so /counselors should work as well.

Actually really promising! How does it differ from Claude Code? Massive opportunity right here!

Let me just quote my original post :) > We actually use Claude Code under the hood. What makes p0 different from Claude Code CLI / Conductor / etc. is our focus on shipping complex features autonomously, across all your existing repos.

In practice this means, you spend much more time defining coding standards and writing product and technical specs (our agents help you with both of course, but you bring the brainpower), and then you hit the button and let p0 build even some seriously large features.

I tried it out and it worked really well for us – awesome tool! The spec-driven approach is a bit different then the usual back-and-forth with agents, and if you invest properly in writing specs it pays of.

Great idea - a well-structured spec with design decisions made upfront dramatically reduces back & forth time and wasted tokens/code post-execution.

Standards generation is great. I really like that approach. It feels much better than relying on just a single CLAUDE.md or AGENTS.md. Does this work with Claude subscriptions like Max?

So CLAUDE.md is fine until it isn't, then you need a whole standards system.

Yes, it works with subscription or API key. We use it with Max 20x. But in full disclosure, I do not know what plans the Anthropic team has, and they've been sending mixed messages. We'll start adding support for other providers/models as well.

A single markdown file will definitely reach its limits very quickly. We also try our best to provide templates for the standards for the agent to follow in the initial code review and interview with you to make those cover all the basics. Obviously this isn't proprietary to us, just works really well in our opinion.

I found myself talking to Claude in plan mode for hours before it ever ships a line of code.... and then still monitoring the execution all the time.

Curious to give this a spin!

Compared to Claude Code etc where do the time savings come from? Fewer PRs that need manual intervention? Higher quality code base to maintain later?

1 - Less "chat as you go" interactions with the agents meaning you don't have to babysit the execution, because once the requirements are defined, the harness executes autonomously.

2 - Conceptually stronger starting point leads to better (and larger) feature PRs. Because we help you generate a really strong spec (prod/tech) upfront, grounded across your repos, that changes the process from "build-and-fix-and-build-and-fix" to "define-and-ship".

And we also help you generate strong standards definitions (teach agents how to build things, how to test things) that foundation helps as well.

I started using P0 on our legacy codebase a couple of weeks ago and so far have shipped 3 features to production. Very helpful tool!

Do y'all automatically feed information back into the spec and refine that over time?

hey, this is Christian, one of the builders of p0.

Think of the specs more as feature-specific documents. Like a very well-defined epic or ticket. But the "standards" codebase documentation is kept fresh at all times automatically and agents always reference that.

Interesting approach to put a lot of emphasis on the spec.

Does this only work on existing codebases?

No, also works on new projects. We do recommend you set up "standards" first though, a documentation of how you want things to be done, for example how you do auth, how you handle multi-tenancy, how migrations work, whatever applies to your new project. The whole point of spec-driven is not not let AI wing it, but be very prescriptive.

We include a couple of templates to make that easier - NextJs + Convex + ShadCn/ui, NextJs + Supabase + ShadCn/ui, etc.

This is crazy cool. What does your roadmap look like?

Looks super interesting, and it's a great team.

seems to be pretty heavily tied in with claude? what if i would want to try out different models at some point?

The next generation!!!

Great team behind it!

insane team behind this, will be big

Initial impression is that it looks cool. $100 / month is too pricey for hackers. I know the infra costs are high, but still.

Love it!

Hey HN - Arndt here, one of the builders of p0. These always provoke some colorful discussion around here, so let me give some background.

We've been building p0 because we kept hitting the same wall: AI coding tools are great at generating code from scratch, but can fall flat when shipping complex features into multi-repo codebases with real architecture, real standards, and real constraints. We'd get impressive results at first glance, then spend hours fixing the output to match our actual patterns.

p0 bundles two things: a Mac desktop app and a purpose-built harness that treats feature development as a structured pipeline, not an open-ended chat.

How it works:

You start with a product spec (markdown) or an idea and end up with a set of PRs for all the repos that were touched.

p0 runs through a 5-phase pipeline in isolated Git worktrees:

1. Import your spec, and/or brainstorm with AI to refine it, grounded in your codebase and standards

2. A specialized agent breaks it into phased tickets with technical contracts (acceptance criteria, architecture prescriptions, dependencies)

3. Engineering agents implement tickets in parallel while you watch a live ticket tree and agent activity in real-time... or grab a coffee

4. QA agents run through verification loops to enforce the contracts

5. Refine and create PRs in your repos

Why not just use Claude Code Plan mode / [name your tool]

We actually use Claude Code under the hood. What makes p0 different from Claude Code CLI / Conductor / etc. is our focus on shipping complex features autonomously, across all your existing repos.

Spec first -- Puts humans in control of as much product and technical details as you can imagine, and we help you create/refine with agents grounded in your codebase.

Contracts and QA loops -- We generate clear acceptance criteria and boundaries for each task. QA loops make sure they were adhered to.

Ticketing -- The architect breaks every feature into phased tickets with dependency ordering. This isn't just a simple plan, it allows us to break complex problems into smaller, context-fitting tickets, and bring them back together into one cohesive implementation.

Subagents -- Nothing fancy here, just a set of roles we've fine-tuned for months, so you don't have to start from scratch.

Standards -- Typical coding agent behavior is to get a cursory (haha) understanding by reading code. But that clogs up context quickly, and rarely rises to the architecture understanding level. When you first launch p0, we'll help you generate a better AI-targeted documentation.

Multi repo -- The whole harness is multi-repo aware. It maintains cross-repo context (imports, API contracts, shared types) and creates coordinated worktrees across all your repos in a single session.

Local-first, team features through the cloud:

All code stays on your machine on isolated worktrees. We do sync codebase documentation and workspace setup through our cloud so your teams can share those for convenience. And of course the prompts go to Anthropic's API.

Limitations:

- The spec-driven workflow has a learning curve. If you're used to the "chat away as you go" flow, the structured planning is a new thing to get used to. - macOS only right now, Linux/Windows are on the roadmap. - Works best for substantial features -- for small features, you're better off using Claude's plan mode. - Requires a Claude subscription or API key and works best with high limits / the 20x plan. Everything is finetuned for Claude 4.6 Opus right now. We plan on supporting other providers, but Claude is where the quality bar is.

What we'd love for you to try:

Is the spec-driven workflow helpful in building larger features? Did we miss anything? What integrations matter most? (We support GitHub, Gitlab, Linear right now)

You can download p0 at https://www.bepurple.ai. Happy to answer any questions about the architecture or approach.

We said the same thing about 4GLs in '87 and CASE tools in '95. The demo always works. The crunch is six months in when the generated stuff has to integrate with the gnarly legacy bits nobody documented.