How the bench grows
Three depth bands — lite, standard, ultra. The install path opens in a follow-on release.
Bassclef routes each task to one practitioner from a small bench of named thinkers. Norman on affordances. Cooper on personas. Tufte on data-ink. Beck on test rhythm. The full list is on the luminaries page.
The bench you can call scales with how you use bassclef.
The three bands
Lite. Eleven practitioners on the bench: Cooper, Norman, Beck, Cockburn, Feathers, Ogilvy, Brooks, Ousterhout, Torvalds, Maurya, Toulmin. Enough for most solo work.
Standard. Install @thebassclef/standard alongside the core package. Three more skills wake up — /journal, /skill, /ticket — and the picker across /launch, /stage, and /riff-prototypes gains access to the full 96-luminary catalog. Standard does not gate on ANTHROPIC_API_KEY — Claude Code already provides the LLM. A few standard-tier skills that call third-party services still ask for their own credentials (Slack tokens, Zenodo keys).
Ultra. Invitation-only for now. Later, contribution earns a spot — see the rite below.
Install path
The install path is not open yet. When it opens, the release note lands on Substack — a reply on any post is how new adopters surface.
Prefer GitHub? Watch the bassclef-cli repo for release signals.
The rite
Two paths:
- Ship a skill upstream that gets merged.
- File a bug that gets fixed because your ticket surfaced it.
Contributors get named in release notes when their work ships, and in Substack posts when there's enough to write up. Access to the standard bench opens for named contributors over time; ultra follows the same path.
No form. No badge. No automated promotion.