What it does
Task Master, also written Taskmaster, helps an AI assistant in your editor plan and track development work. You write a product requirements document and ask your assistant to parse it, and Task Master generates tasks that can be listed, expanded into subtasks, linked by dependencies, grouped with tags and marked done. It can suggest the next task to work on and has a research command that gathers current information using project context. It can be added as an MCP server to editors such as Cursor, Windsurf and VS Code, added to Claude Code with a single command, or installed through npm as the task-master command-line tool. Its AI commands need an API key for at least one supported provider, such as Anthropic, OpenAI, Google Gemini, Perplexity, xAI or OpenRouter, or the Claude Code or Codex CLI, which need no key. You can set a main, a research and a fallback model. A tool-loading setting offers all 36 MCP tools, a standard set of 15 or a core set of 7 to save context. The licence is MIT with the Commons Clause: use, modification and distribution are allowed, but selling Task Master itself or offering it as a hosted service is not.
Capabilities
- Parses a product requirements document into a task list
- Works as an MCP server in Cursor, Windsurf, VS Code and Claude Code, or as a command-line tool
- Next-task suggestions, task expansion, dependencies and tags
- Separate main, research and fallback models across several providers
- Selectable MCP tool sets (core, standard or all) to limit context use
When to use it
- Breaking a project's requirements into tasks for an AI coding assistant to work through
- Asking your editor's AI chat which task to work on next
- Researching current best practices with project context from inside your editor
