Research phases
A five-phase research project
The corpus was built in four discovery phases (A, B, D, E) followed by a synthesis pass. Each phase doubled the corpus and discovered structural patterns the previous phase had no vocabulary for.
Phase A — Seed corpus
11 frameworksFramed the space as spec-driven development: skills-behavioral, mirror-cmd-skill, MCP-anchored, markdown-scaffold, closed-IDE. The 11 seeds became the taxonomy anchors.
Key finding
The field could be described with 5 archetypes. All seeds shipped installable methodology.
Phase B — Tier A frameworks
319 frameworksUncovered an entire operational layer the seeds had no vocabulary for: multi-agent orchestrators, PR-lifecycle daemons, governance frameworks, UI passthroughs, memory engines, observability layers. Batch synthesis notes in _index/batch-NN-notes.md.
Key finding
The framework set was not just about spec-driven development. An orchestration/governance layer existed independently.
Phase D — Tier B frameworks
323 frameworksThree new races surfaced that didn't exist in Phase A's taxonomy: (1) cross-vendor model routing — 20 frameworks routing Claude vs GPT vs Gemini; (2) token-efficient symbolic encoding — 14 frameworks, led by rtk-token-killer at 54k★; (3) LLM-evaluated hooks — 4-5 frameworks where the hook itself is an LLM call. Phase D also surfaced claude-code-system-prompts (Piebald AI) — revealing Anthropic's own Claude Code already implements 8-stage multi-agent review internally.
Key finding
The community is unknowingly reinventing capabilities that already exist inside Claude Code.
Phase E — Synthesis
Cross-corpus synthesis identifying: top-15 deep-dive frameworks, 5-framework reference baseline, 7-framework defensible set, 45 one-of-a-kind architectural primitives, and the headline finding that the community has split into five concurrent races.
Key finding
The Phase C 5-framework synthesis baseline (superpowers + openspec + AO + forge-lucasduys + entroly) was validated. Phase D added Trellis and gh-aw-githubnext to yield a 7-framework defensible set.