Qrspi

QRSPI

Question, Research, Structure, Plan, Implement — an 8-phase workflow for Claude Code that breaks complex coding tasks into focused prompts with clear artifacts between each step.

The Problem

The original Research-Plan-Implement (RPI) workflow used 3 monolithic prompts with 85+ instructions each. Two things went wrong:

1. Instruction budget overflow. LLMs follow ~150-200 instructions reliably. A single 85-instruction prompt plus CLAUDE.md, tools, and MCP left little room. Steps got skipped — especially the interactive ones that required "magic words" to trigger.
2. Decisions made too early. By the time you saw the 1000-line plan, the agent had already made all the design decisions. Correcting course meant re-doing expensive work.

The Solution

Split research into 2 phases, planning into 3 phases, and implementation into 3 phases. Each phase:

- Runs in its own context window
- Reads only its input artifacts (not the full conversation history)
- Produces a markdown file that feeds the next phase
- Stays under 40 instructions

The human reviews Design (~200 lines) and Structure (~2 pages) — not a 1000-line plan. By the time code is written, alignment has already happened.

Install

Quick install (copy into your project)

Manual install

1. Copy the contents of .claude/commands/qrspi/ into your project's .claude/commands/qrspi/
2. Copy the contents of .claude/agents/ into your project's .claude/agents/
3. Both directories must exist at the root of your project

Verify installation

Open Claude Code in your project and type /qrspi/ — you should see all 8 commands in autocomplete.

Usage

Start a fresh context window between phases for best results.

When to use QRSPI

Use it for complex, multi-file changes in existing codebases — the kind where getting the design…