Introduction

aico is how you build your AI team.

Traditional AI assistants work well until you need specialized workflows. You end up writing custom prompts, repeating instructions, and losing context between sessions.

This is what aico aims to solve. It is built around the following principles:

• Employees, Not Prompts: AI collaborators with pre-built skills, commands, and domain expertise.
• Skills Over Instructions: Reusable capabilities that trigger automatically based on context.
• Open Source: Everything is transparent and customizable.
• Platform Agnostic: Works with Claude Code, Codex, and other AI coding assistants.

Employees

aico introduces the concept of "AI employees" - packages of skills, commands, and documentation that extend AI coding assistants.

Each employee has a specific role:

• PM (Product Manager): Product requirements, user stories, brainstorming
• Frontend Engineer: UI/UX implementation, component design, styling
• Backend Engineer: API development, database design, system architecture

Skills

Skills are the core capabilities of employees. They trigger automatically based on context or can be invoked manually.

When you say "I have a product idea...", the PM's brainstorming skill automatically activates, guiding you through structured ideation.

Commands

Commands are shortcuts for common workflows. They're invoked with a slash prefix like /pm.plan or /frontend.design.

Commands let you trigger complex workflows with a single action.

Getting Started

# Initialize your project
npx aico init
 
# Add an AI employee (shorthand)
npx aico add pm
 
# Or use full name
npx aico add @the-aico/pm

That's it. Your AI assistant now has PM capabilities including brainstorming, requirements analysis, and user story writing.