Task Master

Task Master gives Claude a project manager. Write a short brief of what you want to build, and it breaks it into a dependency-ordered list of tasks, then works through them one at a time, picking the next task, splitting big ones into subtasks and marking them done.

It keeps Claude on track in long builds, where it otherwise loses the plot or tries to do everything at once. Everything lives in a .taskmaster folder in your project, so you can pick up where you left off.

It can run on your Claude Code login, so you don't need a separate API key. The install line above loads only the 7 core tools. The full set of 36 uses about 21,000 tokens of context. The licence is MIT with a Commons Clause: free to use, but you can't resell it.

• Turn a product brief (PRD) into a task list in the right order
• Pick the next task to work on based on what's already done
• Break a big task into smaller subtasks
• Score how complex each part of the project is
• Research current best practice for a task before building it
• Track progress across separate workstreams

Open your terminal in the project folder and run:

claude mcp add task-master-ai --scope user --env TASK_MASTER_TOOLS="core" -- npx -y task-master-ai@latest

Other ways to set it up:

# No API key needed if you use your Claude Code login. Tell Claude:
# "Change the main model to claude-code/sonnet"
# Or add a key (ANTHROPIC_API_KEY, PERPLEXITY_API_KEY, OPENAI_API_KEY...) to your project's .env

Builders using Claude Code on projects bigger than a single afternoon.

• Building an app from a brief
• Keeping long projects on track
• Breaking down big features
• Vibe coding with structure