The Agentic Project Template I Use for Every New Client

Client kickoffs used to take me a full week. I now bootstrap a new project in two hours using a template built around agent-first assumptions. The template encodes the decisions I used to rethink every time. It is how I compress week one into day one, and it is the single highest-leverage change I made to my consulting practice last year.

What Is in the Template

A GSD-style .planning/ folder with phase scaffolds
Pre-wired Claude Code agents for explore, implement, review
A CLAUDE.md with brand rules and client context slots
CI that runs tsc --noEmit and basic tests on every push
A deploy stub for Vercel with preview URLs on PRs
A secrets scaffold wired to AWS Parameter Store or Vercel env
A starter README that already answers the first three questions every new teammate asks

The Kickoff Script

bash

gh repo create client-name --private --template plai/agentic-starter
cd client-name
./scripts/seed-client.sh 'Client Name' 'scope summary'

Two commands. A working repo with agents, planning, and CI ready to go. The seed script fills in the client name everywhere it needs to appear and commits the changes in a single clean first commit.

Why Templates Beat Checklists

A checklist reminds you what to do. A template does it for you. Every decision the template makes is one less decision a tired founder makes at the end of the day. A week of compounded small decisions is a week lost to fatigue. Encoding those decisions in a template moves them from per-project to one-time.

What I Refuse to Put in the Template

Client-specific logic. Payment providers. Auth choices. Everything opinionated lives outside the template so I can specialize cleanly without a fork. The moment the template tries to solve too many problems, it becomes another thing to maintain rather than a starting point.

The Maintenance Cadence

Every quarter I pull the best patterns from live client projects back into the template. That keeps it current and prevents it from drifting. If I notice the same fix applied twice across two projects, it goes into the template before the third project starts.

Read about template repos in the GitHub template documentation if you want to wire one up yourself. The tooling is better than it was a year ago and the setup is a one-afternoon job.