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Taskmaster

Give Claude a written plan and Taskmaster breaks it into ordered tasks, tells you what to do next, and tracks progress as you build.

Before you start:
  • Claude Code
  • Node.js (for npx)
  • Optional: an AI provider API key
Setup
5 min
Level
Intermediate
Stars
28.2k
License
MIT with Commons Clause
Jump to the install commandView on GitHub

What it does

Taskmaster is a task manager for building software with AI. You write a PRD (a plain document describing what you want to build), and Taskmaster turns it into a list of tasks with dependencies. Claude then picks the next task, works on it and marks it done.

It connects to Claude Code as an MCP server, which is a connector that gives Claude new tools.

Install it

  1. Open your terminal and run the command below to add Taskmaster to Claude Code.
  2. If you want to use an outside model provider, add its API key to a .env file in your project, or to the env section of the taskmaster-ai MCP config.
  3. To use Claude Code itself as the model (no API key), tell Claude the prompt in the second block.
  4. Then ask Claude to initialize Taskmaster in your project with the third block.

Add it to Claude Code

Terminal
claude mcp add taskmaster-ai -- npx -y task-master-ai

Use Claude Code as the model

Prompt
Change the main model to claude-code/sonnet

Set up your project

Prompt
Initialize taskmaster-ai in my project

Use it

  1. Write your plan at .taskmaster/docs/prd.txt. An example template appears in .taskmaster/templates/example_prd.txt after setup. The more detail, the better the tasks.
  2. Ask Claude to parse your PRD, for example: Can you parse my PRD at scripts/prd.txt? (use your PRD's actual path).
  3. Ask: What's the next task I should work on?
  4. Ask: Can you help me implement task 3?

Good to know

Taskmaster needs at least one model source: an API key from Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, xAI or OpenRouter, or Claude Code or Codex CLI with no key. A research model is optional but recommended.

By default it loads 36 tools, about 21,000 tokens of context. You can load a smaller set by setting TASK_MASTER_TOOLS to standard or core. The docs show how.

Links

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