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Fractal Co-Design

Getting Started

Fractal Co-Design ships in three layers, each independently useful:

  1. The canon — the methodology itself, in plain Markdown.
  2. The skills — Claude Code skills that operationalize the methodology.
  3. The tools — TypeScript packages that implement canon concepts (coming in v0.2).

You can adopt FCD by reading the canon, by installing the skills, or both.

1. Read the canon

The canon is the single source of truth. Two complementary references:

If you only have 30 minutes, read The Component, then Extreme Co-Design, then the Applied Example.

2. Install the Claude skills

The fcd-* skill family encodes FCD into Claude Code as user-invocable slash commands. Each skill is a focused, single-purpose tool — fcd-card for the lightest spec, fcd-design for full PRDs, fcd-surface for port co-design, and so on. See the Skills overview for the full list.

The @fractal-co-design/skills CLI installer is in progress for v0.1. Until it ships, you can install the skills manually by cloning the repo and copying the skills/ directory into ~/.claude/skills/:

Terminal window
git clone https://github.com/VledicFranco/fractal-co-design.git
cp -r fractal-co-design/skills/fca ~/.claude/skills/
cp -r fractal-co-design/skills/fcd-* ~/.claude/skills/

Then in Claude Code, the slash commands /fca, /fcd-ref, /fcd-design, /fcd-plan, /fcd-surface, /fcd-commission, /fcd-debate, and /fcd-review will be available.

3. Where things live

The repo follows the structure FCD recommends — co-located documentation, single source of truth, every artifact next to what it describes:

DirectoryContents
canon/The single source of truth for FCD. FCA + ECD reference Markdown.
skills/Claude Code skill source files. One subdirectory per skill, each containing a SKILL.md.
apps/docs/This site (Astro + Starlight). Reads from canon/ at build time.
packages/TypeScript packages. Empty in v0.1; @fractal-co-design/fca-index arrives in v0.2.
examples/Worked examples — custom language profiles, polyglot projects (planned).

The docs site renders the same Markdown that lives in canon/. There is no second source of truth — when you read this site, you are reading the canon.

What’s next