I Made an AI Coding Template (Sort of)

Sep 19, 2025

Update: After releasing this, Anthropic added Claude Code Plugins, which turned out to be a much better way to distribute this.

Update 2: This has been deprecated. I’ve moved on to using Codex inside of OpenCode for now, but I am sure that will change again.

So, you might remember that post I wrote about my “vibe coding” experiment a while back. It was fun, but it was also a mess. The AI was great at churning out code for small tasks, but it fell apart when it came to the big picture, leaving me with a codebase that was a nightmare to work with.

That whole experience got me thinking. Maybe the trick to working with AI isn’t just to give it vague instructions and hope for the best. What if you could guide it, kind of like a senior developer guides a junior?

That’s the idea behind a little project I’ve been tinkering with: the AI Assisted Template. I just pushed a super early, alpha version to npm today. It’s essentially the evolution of the “V2” development process I mentioned in my “Vibe Coding” post, where I started enforcing more structure and acting as more of a guide for the AI.

What’s the Basic Idea?

The template is basically my attempt to get the AI to think more like an architect before it starts spitting out code. It’s a collection of prompts, scripts, custom subagents, and a workflow that breaks the development process down into a few phases:

1. /design: Figuring out what we’re actually trying to build.
2. /architect: Coming up with a plan for how to build it.
3. /plan: Breaking that plan down into smaller, manageable steps.
4. /develop: Actually writing the code.

The hope is that by giving the AI more structure and context, it’ll make fewer weird mistakes and create code that’s a bit more sane.

Super Experimental Alpha Version

I can’t stress this enough: this is an alpha. It’s an experiment. It’s probably got some rough edges, and I’m still figuring things out. If you look at the commit history, it is a bit of a nightmare because I’ve gone down a lot of different paths. But I wanted to put it out there in case anyone else finds it interesting or wants to play around with it. I’m definitely looking for feedback, and I’m hoping that by putting it out there, it can be battle-tested by people other than me.

Want to Try It?

# 1. Add this marketplace
/plugin marketplace add TaylorHuston/ai-coding-template

# 2. Install the AI Toolkit plugin
/plugin install ai-toolkit

# 3. Initialize your project
cd your-project
/toolkit-init

That’ll set you up with the basic structure. You can find more details, instructions, and the source code over on the GitHub repository.

I have no idea if this is the “right” way to work with AI, but it’s been a fun experiment so far. If you do end up trying it out, I’d love to hear what you think!