Vibe Thesis
Start with a strong stance before you even ask for a line of code.
A Claude Code plugin that scaffolds and co-authors thesis-shaped artifacts —
academic dissertations, master's theses, long-form research articles,
position essays. Install, say "scaffold a vibe thesis project for me,"
get a styled PDF skeleton plus a working render pipeline in roughly 30 minutes.
Vibe Thesis is a wrapper around the ThesisStudio template that adds
Claude-Code-native orchestration: dual scaffold paths (offline-bundled or live gh
template fork), an author-voice synthesis interview, and a self-review-tone guard.
Install
From the Anthropic plugin marketplace (preferred)
/plugin marketplace add estevanhernandez-stack-ed/Vibe-Thesis
/plugin install vibe-thesis@vibe-thesis
From a raw git URL (fallback)
/plugin marketplace add https://github.com/estevanhernandez-stack-ed/Vibe-Thesis
/plugin install vibe-thesis@vibe-thesis
After install, reload Claude Code's plugin registry so the new skills are
discovered (the orchestrator skill vibe-thesis and the slash commands
/vibe-thesis:vibe-render, /vibe-thesis:vibe-status, /vibe-thesis:voice,
/vibe-thesis:guard). Either run /plugin reload, or close and reopen the
session — newly-installed plugins do not auto-discover until reload.
Quickstart
- Open Claude Code in a fresh empty directory.
- Say: "scaffold a vibe thesis project for me on
<your topic>" (or any
natural-language equivalent — "set up a vibe thesis project," "I want to
write a thesis on <topic>").
- The orchestrator picks the right scaffold path automatically:
- Path B (default when
gh is installed and authenticated): gh repo create --template estevanhernandez-stack-ed/ThesisStudio <name> — your
project gets a real GitHub remote at minute zero, plus the always-fresh
ThesisStudio template.
- Path A (offline / no
gh): the plugin's bundled templates/full/ is
copied into the directory.
- The project-local
/bootstrap skill (lifted from ThesisStudio) interviews
you for project title, author, mode (dissertation | article | masters), three
pillar names, citation style, and license.
- The plugin-side
/vibe-thesis:voice interview names 2-4 well-known author
voices + 2-4 contemporary field experts in your topic + a synthesis ratio.
Writes a ## VOICE SYNTHESIS block to CLAUDE.md so the LeadWriter persona
reads it at drafting time.
- Toolchain install: dev container (recommended) or native install.
- Round-trip confirmation:
npm run render:pdf against the bundled example
produces 08_OUTPUT/pdf/example.pdf — the install is verified.
- Replace the demo content in
01_PLANNING/, 03_BODY/, 05_CITATIONS/
with your own. Talk to Claude as you go — it dispatches to the right
sub-skill for each phase.
Slash commands
| Command | What it does |
|---|
/vibe-thesis:vibe-render [pdf|html|md|all] | Pre-runs compile-tokens + check-citations, then renders via Pandoc. |
/vibe-thesis:vibe-status | One-screen summary: planning docs, body content, claim coverage, citations, last render. |
/vibe-thesis:voice [revise] | Author-voice synthesis interview. Idempotent. |
/vibe-thesis:guard [strict|standard] | Self-review-tone lint over 03_BODY/*.md. Advisory. |
Project-local skills (from ThesisStudio templates payload)
| Skill | When to invoke |
|---|
/bootstrap | First-fork customization. Re-runnable to revise. |
/merge-authors | Braid multi-author drafts. |
/lay-translator | Generate a layperson-readable version of body content. |
/research-integrate | Pull research notes into body + bibliography. |
Tech stack (in scaffolded projects, not the plugin itself)
The plugin ships templates; the plugin itself has zero npm runtime dependencies.
- Pandoc 3.1.13 (pinned via GitHub release in the dev container)
- TeX Live —
xelatex, biber, latexmk
- Node 20+
ajv + ajv-formats for schema validation@retorquere/bibtex-parser for citation linthusky 9 + lint-staged- Fonts: JetBrains Mono v2.304, Source Serif 4 v4.005, Space Grotesk
Dev container
The bundled dev container ships with three hard-won fixes baked in:
install-fonts.sh — pinned-release font install for the design system..gitattributes with * text=auto eol=lf — prevents Windows-side VS Code
from CRLF-corrupting the Unix-style render scripts.- Persistent
~/.claude volume mount — Claude Code config survives container
rebuilds.
Architecture
estevanhernandez-stack-ed
