Quick Start

Set up C² in half a day.

C² goes onto a new or existing project in seven steps. Don’t skip the foundation — it’s what makes everything else work.

Minimal running state
2–3 hours
Full implementation
1–2 weeks of active sessions
The one rule that matters
Every session ends with a brief
  1. 0115 min

    Create the folder structure

    Lay out docs/ with 01-planning through 06-agents. The contextbase lives beside the codebase, in the same repo. Add a .gitkeep to each empty directory so it commits.

    docs/
├── 01-planning/    prds/ + strategy/
├── 02-working/     prompt-briefs/ + sessions/ + tasks/
├── 03-knowledge/   gotchas/ + patterns/ + decisions/
├── 04-operations/  deployment/ + runbooks/
├── 05-reference/   tech-stack.md + naming-conventions.md
└── 06-agents/      team.md + reviews/
  2. 0220 min

    Design your agent team

    Before writing a line of code, decide who's on the team. Which agent leads (runs the terminal sessions), which reviews (PRDs, security, architecture — budget-capped), and any specialists for repeatable tasks. C² is agent-agnostic: you're committing to roles, not a vendor.

  3. 0345 min

    Set up the Router

    The single file every AI session starts from — the living index of your contextbase. Name it for your agent so it's read automatically: AGENTS.md (the cross-agent default), CLAUDE.md for Claude Code, GEMINI.md for Gemini. Ship it agent-correct from the start — don't rely on a rename. It links to the active PRDs, the latest session brief, the knowledge index, and the pilot rules. The rule: if the Router doesn't link to it, the AI won't find it — so keep it current every session.

  4. 0430 min

    Write the Platform PRD

    One per product — the strategic layer every Feature PRD inherits from. What does this product do in one sentence? Who uses it? What are the three things it must do well? What is explicitly out of scope? Stop when you have those.

  5. 0530 min

    Write your first Feature PRD

    Pick one feature you're actively working on. Fill in Problem, Users, Goals, Non-goals — leave the rest for later. A Feature PRD is a living document, not a requirements spec. Principle A — Fly the plane: keep the cockpit small, never more than five PRDs in-progress at once.

  6. 0630 min

    Write your first Prompt Brief

    Pick one concrete piece of work. Run the 6-item quality gate before doing anything — goal, scope exclusions, testable acceptance criteria, non-goals, testing approach, definition of done. If you can't answer all six, don't start. Write the answers first.

  7. 0730 min

    Run the session, write the Session Brief

    Run your first C² session. At the end, capture what was done, decisions made, blockers resolved, the next-session start state, and — if the session produced a Key Discovery — a 03-knowledge/ entry committed in the same commit. That capture-then-consolidate habit (the Learn loop) is what keeps your Router and knowledge index current. The next session starts from this brief.

And then

Now the compounding starts

After your first session you have a router that loads context automatically, a PRD hierarchy, a Prompt Brief with scope and acceptance criteria, a Session Brief that serves as AI memory, and maybe your first knowledge entry.

The next session starts from the Session Brief. The one after that builds on the knowledge index. After 20 sessions, the contextbase is denser than the codebase in decision context.

The only rule that matters: every session ends with a Session Brief. Everything else follows from that.
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