docs: add "It's working if" convention; flesh out PRD section

- Replace the inline "watch for the leading words" line with an optional `## It's working if` section — a short list of observable signals the skill is doing its job. Keeps observability from being hammered onto leading words specifically. - Build out to-prd's "What the PRD includes" with proper casing and a one-line explainer per section. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
docs: rework the skill docs-page template
2026-07-29 11:02:41 +07:00 · 2026-07-01 11:05:35 +01:00 · 2026-07-01 11:00:54 +01:00 · 2026-07-01 10:41:51 +01:00 · 2026-07-01 09:57:05 +01:00 · 2026-07-01 09:51:25 +01:00
51 changed files with 2751 additions and 262 deletions
@@ -5,6 +5,6 @@ Engineering skills depend on per-repo config (issue tracker, triage label vocabu
 We split these into **hard-dependency** and **soft-dependency** skills:

 - **Hard dependency** (`to-issues`, `to-prd`, `triage`) — include an explicit one-liner: _"… should have been provided to you — run `/setup-matt-pocock-skills` if not."_ Without the mapping, output is wrong, not just fuzzy.
- **Soft dependency** (`diagnose`, `tdd`, `improve-codebase-architecture`, `zoom-out`) — reference "the project's domain glossary" and "ADRs in the area you're touching" in vague prose only. If the docs aren't there, the skill still works; output is just less sharp.
+- **Soft dependency** (`diagnose`, `tdd`, `improve-codebase-architecture`) — reference "the project's domain glossary" and "ADRs in the area you're touching" in vague prose only. If the docs aren't there, the skill still works; output is just less sharp.

 The split keeps soft-dependency skills token-light and avoids cargo-culting the setup pointer into places where it isn't load-bearing.
@@ -0,0 +1,18 @@
+# Model-invoked vs user-invoked
+
+Every `SKILL.md` in this repo is a skill. The one axis that splits them is **invocation** — who can reach it:
+
+- **User-invoked** — reachable **only by the human typing its name**. Set `disable-model-invocation: true` in the frontmatter. The `description` is **human-facing**: a one-line summary read by a person browsing slash-commands. Strip trigger lists ("Use when the user says…").
+- **Model-invoked** — reachable by **model or user**. The default: omit `disable-model-invocation`. The `description` is **model-facing** and keeps rich trigger phrasing ("Use when the user wants…, mentions…, asks for…") so auto-invocation fires. The test for whether a skill should stay model-invoked: _could the model usefully reach for this autonomously?_ (Reuse is the reason to extract a skill, not the test.)
+
+Because a user-invoked skill has no description, nothing but the human can reach it — no other skill can fire it. So a user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but it can never reach another user-invoked skill.
+
+Bucket `README.md`s and the top-level `README.md` group entries into **User-invoked** and **Model-invoked**.
+
+## Dependencies between them
+
+Dependencies are expressed as **`/skill`-style prose invocation** ("Run the `/grilling` skill"), not deep `../other-skill/FILE.md` cross-references. Shared reference docs live inside the skill that owns them; other skills reach that material by invoking the skill, not by linking across folders.
+
+## Passive vs active domain work
+
+Merely _reading_ `CONTEXT.md` for vocabulary is a one-line prose pointer, not the `domain-modeling` skill. Only the active build/sharpen discipline (challenge terms, edge-case scenarios, write ADRs, update `CONTEXT.md` inline) is `domain-modeling`.
@@ -0,0 +1,81 @@
+# Writing docs pages
+
+Every promoted skill (`engineering/`, `productivity/`, `misc/`) has a human-facing **docs page** at `docs/<bucket>/<skill-name>.md` — the docs tree mirrors the bucket folders under `skills/`. It is published at `https://aihero.dev/skills-<skill-name>`; the URL is always `skills-<skill-name>` regardless of bucket, so the docs path is repo organisation only. The page is not the skill and not a copy of `SKILL.md`.
+
+Most of these skills are **user-invoked**: the agent will never fire them for you, so *you* are the index that has to remember they exist and when to reach for them. That memory is **cognitive load**. The job of a docs page is to relieve it — to orient one reader around one skill so they can hold it in their head, know when to reach for it, and see where it sits in the system. The pages are collectively a distributed router; each is a node.
+
+Act whenever a promoted skill is added, renamed, or has its behaviour changed: create or re-sync its docs page. A rename moves the file too (`docs/<bucket>/<old>.md` → `docs/<bucket>/<new>.md`), because the published URL tracks the name; a skill that moves buckets moves its docs file to the matching folder. Skills in `personal/`, `in-progress/`, and `deprecated/` get no page, mirroring the README rule.
+
+Because these pages are published on `aihero.dev`, **every link is absolute** — never a repo-relative path. A link to another skill points at `https://aihero.dev/skills-<name>`; a link into the repo points at its full `https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/...` URL. A relative link that works in the repo breaks once published.
+
+There is no H1 — the published page takes its title from the slug.
+
+## Page structure
+
+Fill the template below. The **fixed frame** (Quickstart block, source link, `## What it does`, `## When to reach for it`, `## Where it fits`) appears on every page. The **adaptable middle** — `## Prerequisites` and the free-form substance sections — carries only what this particular skill earns; delete the rest.
+
+<page-template>
+
+Quickstart:
+
+```bash
+npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=<name>
+```
+
+```bash
+npx skills update <name>
+```
+
+[Source](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/<bucket>/<name>)
+
+## What it does
+
+One or two plain-language paragraphs. Lead with the skill's one-sentence job, then state the **load-bearing constraint** — the single fact that makes this skill behave differently from the obvious default (for `to-prd`: it does not interview the user again, it synthesises what is already known). This line is the most valuable on the page; never omit it.
+
+## When to reach for it
+
+How and when you reach for the skill — two beats, both effectively always present:
+
+- **Invocation mode.** State whether you type it or the agent fires it. A user-invoked skill: "You invoke this by typing `/<name>` — the agent won't reach for it on its own." A model-invoked skill: "Type `/<name>`, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task fits."
+- **Trigger boundary.** The index entry: "reach for this when …". Where the skill is confusable with a sibling, add the other half — "for <X> instead, use [<sibling>](https://aihero.dev/skills-<sibling>)."
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+Optional — include only when the skill needs something in place to be functional; omit the heading entirely otherwise. Covers: a **workspace it writes into** (a stateful skill like `grill-with-docs` writes `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs; `teach` builds a whole directory — say what it writes and where), **prior setup** (`triage`/`to-prd`/`to-issues` need `setup-matt-pocock-skills` to have configured an issue tracker), or **repo-specific tooling**. A stateless skill that runs anywhere has no prerequisites — drop the section.
+
+## <free-form middle>
+
+One to three short sections, in the skill's *own vocabulary*, that make it click — choose whatever headings fit the skill: the loop it runs, the artifact it produces, the fork it makes, the one anti-pattern it kills. There is no prescribed heading; the skills are too heterogeneous for one.
+
+The single non-negotiable: **surface the skill's leading word / load-bearing idea** — `tight` feedback loop, `deep module`, throwaway-code-answers-a-question, red-green. It pays off twice: the reader learns what the skill *is*, and learns the word they'll later think with to *reach for* it.
+
+## It's working if
+
+Optional. A short, checkable list of the observable signals that tell the reader the skill is actually doing its job — what they should see when it fires, and by absence when it hasn't. Include it when a skill has crisp tells (e.g. `to-prd` writes without re-interviewing you; a leading word reappearing in the trace); omit the heading when the signals are vague. A few bullets, no more.
+
+## Where it fits
+
+Always present. Situate the skill in the system in a sentence or two:
+
+- **Role.** Name it: a **chain step** (`grill-with-docs → to-prd → to-issues → tdd`), a **run-once setup** (`setup-matt-pocock-skills`), **periodic maintenance** (`improve-codebase-architecture`, "every few days"), or a **reach-for-it-anytime standalone** (`diagnosing-bugs`, `prototype`, `handoff`). A standalone's map is one honest sentence — far better than omitting the section.
+- **Neighbours.** The one or two siblings that matter, each with a because-clause, linked absolutely.
+- **The map.** Point to [ask-matt](https://aihero.dev/skills-ask-matt), the router over the whole set, so this page stays a node and never has to redraw the graph.
+
+</page-template>
+
+## Conventions
+
+- Explain the **why**, not the process. The page orients and situates the skill; it never reproduces the `SKILL.md` steps or template dumps — a human choosing a tool does not need the runbook.
+- Use the skill's **leading words** (_seam_, _deep module_, _tracer bullet_) so the page and the skill speak one language.
+- Keep the page itself low-load. It is documentation *about* low-cognitive-load skills; furniture (spare headings, restated links) is the thing it is arguing against.
+
+## Done when
+
+- The page exists at `docs/<bucket>/<name>.md`, and no stale page survives a rename or bucket move.
+- The Quickstart block and source link name the correct bucket and skill; the update line names the skill.
+- `## What it does` states the load-bearing constraint.
+- `## When to reach for it` states invocation mode and the trigger boundary.
+- `## Where it fits` names the role and links to `ask-matt`.
+- A prerequisite (workspace, prior setup, tooling) is stated where one exists, and the section is absent where none does.
+- The middle surfaces the leading word.
+- Every link is absolute, and every one resolves.
@@ -0,0 +1,8 @@
+# Changesets
+
+Hello and welcome! This folder has been automatically generated by `@changesets/cli`, a build tool that works
+with multi-package repos, or single-package repos to help you version and publish your code. You can
+find the full documentation for it [in our repository](https://github.com/changesets/changesets).
+
+We have a quick list of common questions to get you started engaging with this project in
+[our documentation](https://github.com/changesets/changesets/blob/main/docs/common-questions.md).
@@ -0,0 +1,15 @@
+{
+  "$schema": "https://unpkg.com/@changesets/config@3.1.4/schema.json",
+  "changelog": [
+    "@changesets/changelog-github",
+    { "repo": "mattpocock/skills" }
+  ],
+  "commit": false,
+  "privatePackages": { "version": true, "tag": true },
+  "fixed": [],
+  "linked": [],
+  "access": "restricted",
+  "baseBranch": "main",
+  "updateInternalDependencies": "patch",
+  "ignore": []
+}
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+"mattpocock-skills": minor
+---
+
+Add a fourth **Task** ticket type to the **`decision-mapping`** skill. Some blockers are neither a decision, a prototype, nor research — just literal manual work that has to happen before the discussion can move forward (moving data, signing up for a third-party service, provisioning access). The agent automates it where it can, otherwise hands the human a precise checklist, and records any resulting facts later tickets depend on.
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+"mattpocock-skills": minor
+---
+
+Make the **`prototype`** skill model-invoked, so the agent can reach for it autonomously (and other skills can too). Its description is rewritten around the leading word _prototype_ — throwaway code that answers a design question — with one trigger per branch (state/logic sanity-check, or UI exploration).
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+"mattpocock-skills": patch
+---
+
+Give the in-progress **`review`** skill an always-on Fowler smell baseline on its Standards axis. A curated ~12 high-signal "Bad Smells in Code" (Mysterious Name, Duplicated Code, Feature Envy, Data Clumps, Primitive Obsession, Repeated Switches, Shotgun Surgery, Divergent Change, Speculative Generality, Message Chains, Middle Man, Refused Bequest) are inlined into `SKILL.md` as a fixed baseline alongside whatever the repo documents — not a new third axis. Two binding rules keep it safe: a documented repo standard overrides the baseline, and every smell is reported as a judgement call, never a hard violation.
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+"mattpocock-skills": patch
+---
+
+Add the **tautological test** anti-pattern to the `tdd` skill. Tests whose assertion is recomputed the way the code computes it pass by construction and give zero confidence — distinct from the implementation-coupling anti-pattern already covered. Added as a peer at the same three sites: a Philosophy principle (expected values must come from an independent source of truth), a per-cycle checklist gate, and a BAD/GOOD example pair in `tests.md`.
@@ -0,0 +1,5 @@
+---
+"mattpocock-skills": patch
+---
+
+Extend the **`triage`** skill to triage external pull requests, treating a PR as an issue with attached code that runs through the same roles and state machine. PRs flow inline alongside issues (gated by a per-repo setup toggle), discovery surfaces only external PRs, the bug-only "reproduce" step is generalized into a single "verify the claim" step, and a redundancy check resolves already-implemented requests to `wontfix` without polluting the out-of-scope knowledge base. `setup-matt-pocock-skills` gains the PRs-as-a-request-surface toggle for GitHub/GitLab.
@@ -1,6 +1,7 @@
 {
  "name": "mattpocock-skills",
  "skills": [
+    "./skills/engineering/ask-matt",
    "./skills/engineering/diagnosing-bugs",
    "./skills/engineering/grill-with-docs",
    "./skills/engineering/triage",
@@ -9,15 +10,13 @@
    "./skills/engineering/tdd",
    "./skills/engineering/to-issues",
    "./skills/engineering/to-prd",
-    "./skills/engineering/zoom-out",
    "./skills/engineering/prototype",
    "./skills/engineering/domain-modeling",
    "./skills/engineering/codebase-design",
-    "./skills/productivity/caveman",
    "./skills/productivity/grill-me",
    "./skills/productivity/grilling",
    "./skills/productivity/handoff",
    "./skills/productivity/teach",
-    "./skills/productivity/write-a-skill"
+    "./skills/productivity/writing-great-skills"
  ]
 }
@@ -0,0 +1,37 @@
+name: Release
+
+on:
+  push:
+    branches:
+      - main
+
+concurrency: ${{ github.workflow }}-${{ github.ref }}
+
+jobs:
+  release:
+    name: Version
+    runs-on: ubuntu-latest
+    permissions:
+      contents: write
+      pull-requests: write
+    steps:
+      - name: Checkout
+        uses: actions/checkout@v4
+
+      - name: Setup Node.js
+        uses: actions/setup-node@v4
+        with:
+          node-version: 22
+
+      - name: Install dependencies
+        run: npm ci
+
+      - name: Create Version Pull Request
+        uses: changesets/action@v1
+        with:
+          version: npx changeset version
+          publish: npx changeset tag
+          commit: "chore: version skills"
+          title: "chore: version skills"
+        env:
+          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}
@@ -0,0 +1 @@
+node_modules
@@ -0,0 +1,54 @@
+# mattpocock-skills
+
+## 1.0.1
+
+### Patch Changes
+
+- [`d20ee26`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/d20ee2684e2a9442698ac3c1e0f2c5b68c4cf296) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Make the **`teach`** skill reuse-first. Lessons are now built from reusable **components** in `./assets/` — stylesheets, quiz widgets, simulators, diagram helpers. Reuse is the default: the agent reads `./assets/` before authoring a lesson, builds from what's there, and extracts anything new and reusable into a component rather than inlining it.
+
+## 1.0.0
+
+### Major Changes
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Add the **`ask-matt`** skill — a user-invoked router that points you at the right skill or flow for your situation.
+
+  **Breaking:** `ask-matt` routes over the other user-invoked skills in this repo, so it expects them to be installed.
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Add the shared design skills and rewire existing skills onto them.
+
+  - New **`codebase-design`** skill — the deep-module vocabulary (module, interface, depth, seam, adapter) and the principles for putting a lot of behaviour behind a small interface. The language that previously lived in `improve-codebase-architecture/LANGUAGE.md` now lives here, generalized for reuse across skills.
+  - New **`domain-modeling`** skill — actively build and sharpen a project's domain model, stress-testing terms against the glossary and keeping `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs current.
+  - `improve-codebase-architecture` now draws its architecture vocabulary from `/codebase-design` and its domain model from `/domain-modeling`.
+  - `tdd` now leans on `/codebase-design` for interface-design guidance — its inline `deep-modules.md` / `interface-design.md` notes were removed in favour of the shared skill.
+  - `grill-with-docs` now builds the domain model inline via `/domain-modeling`.
+
+  **Breaking:** these skills now depend on the new `codebase-design` / `domain-modeling` skills, so you must install them too.
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Remove the **`caveman`** and **`zoom-out`** skills.
+
+  - `caveman` was a duplicate of another skill I was testing and was never meant to be public.
+  - `zoom-out` went unused in practice, so it's been removed from the repo.
+
+  **Breaking:** both skills have been removed.
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Rename the **`diagnose`** skill to **`diagnosing-bugs`**.
+
+  **Breaking:** invoke it as `/diagnosing-bugs` — the old `/diagnose` name no longer exists.
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Replace **`write-a-skill`** with **`writing-great-skills`**.
+
+  - Removed `write-a-skill`.
+  - Added `writing-great-skills` (plus its `GLOSSARY.md`) — a reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable, hunting no-ops down to the sentence level.
+  - Exposed `grilling` as a model-invoked skill — the reusable interview loop behind `grill-me` and `grill-with-docs`.
+
+  **Breaking:** `write-a-skill` has been removed; use `writing-great-skills` instead.
+
+### Minor Changes
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Add the **`resolving-merge-conflicts`** skill — a loop for resolving an in-progress git merge or rebase conflict. Standalone, with no dependencies on other skills.
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Rename the skill taxonomy from **Commands / Skills** to **User-invoked / Model-invoked** across the docs, and add `docs/invocation.md` defining the split: user-invoked skills are reachable only when you type them and exist to orchestrate; model-invoked skills can also be reached automatically when the task fits. A user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but never another user-invoked one.
+
+### Patch Changes
+
+- [`47bde84`](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/commit/47bde84da032afb2e5058f997f3bbca47d321dbd) Thanks [@mattpocock](https://github.com/mattpocock)! - Tighten the **`review`** skill: fail-fast ref check, single-sourced rules, and no-op cuts.
@@ -11,6 +11,10 @@ Every skill in `engineering/`, `productivity/`, or `misc/` must have a reference

 Each skill entry in the top-level `README.md` must link the skill name to its `SKILL.md`.

-Each bucket folder has a `README.md` that lists every skill in the bucket with a one-line description, with the skill name linked to its `SKILL.md`. Bucket `README.md`s and the top-level `README.md` group entries into **Commands** and **Skills**.
+Each bucket folder has a `README.md` that lists every skill in the bucket with a one-line description, with the skill name linked to its `SKILL.md`. Bucket `README.md`s and the top-level `README.md` group entries into **User-invoked** and **Model-invoked**.

-Every `SKILL.md` is either a command (always user-invoked, `disable-model-invocation: true`) or a skill (model- or user-invocable). For the full definitions, description conventions, and the rule that commands invoke skills but never commands, see [docs/commands-vs-skills.md](./docs/commands-vs-skills.md).
+Every promoted skill also has a human-facing docs page at `docs/<bucket>/<skill-name>.md` (the docs tree mirrors the bucket folders under `skills/`). The published URL is `https://aihero.dev/skills-<skill-name>` regardless of bucket — the docs path is repo organisation only. When you add, rename, or change the behaviour of a skill in `engineering/`, `productivity/`, or `misc/`, create or re-sync its docs page following [.agents/writing-docs.md](./.agents/writing-docs.md).
+
+Every `SKILL.md` is either user-invoked (`disable-model-invocation: true`, reachable only by the human) or model-invoked (model- or user-reachable). See [.agents/invocation.md](./.agents/invocation.md).
+
+To (re)link every skill into the local harness skill directories (`~/.claude/skills`, `~/.agents/skills`), run `scripts/link-skills.sh`. Each entry is a symlink into this repo, so a `git pull` keeps installed skills current; re-run the script after adding, removing, or renaming a skill.
@@ -132,7 +132,6 @@ For debugging, I've also built a **[`/diagnosing-bugs`](./skills/engineering/dia
 This is built in to every layer of these skills:

 - [`/to-prd`](./skills/engineering/to-prd/SKILL.md) quizzes you about which modules you're touching before creating a PRD
- [`/zoom-out`](./skills/engineering/zoom-out/SKILL.md) tells the agent to explain code in the context of the whole system

 And crucially, [`/improve-codebase-architecture`](./skills/engineering/improve-codebase-architecture/SKILL.md) helps you rescue a codebase that has become a ball of mud. I recommend running it on your codebase once every few days.

@@ -142,25 +141,25 @@ Software engineering fundamentals matter more than ever. These skills are my bes

 ## Reference

-These come in two flavours. **Commands** are always user-invoked (you type `/grill-me`); their job is to orchestrate. **Skills** can be invoked by you _or_ reached for automatically by the agent when the task fits; they hold the reusable discipline. A command may invoke skills, but never another command.
+These split on one axis — who can invoke them. **User-invoked** skills are reachable only when you type them (e.g. `/grill-me`); their job is to orchestrate. **Model-invoked** skills can be invoked by you _or_ reached for automatically by the agent when the task fits; they hold the reusable discipline. A user-invoked skill may invoke model-invoked skills, but never another user-invoked one.

 ### Engineering

 Skills I use daily for code work.

-**Commands**
+**User-invoked**

+- **[ask-matt](./skills/engineering/ask-matt/SKILL.md)** — Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the user-invoked skills in this repo.
 - **[grill-with-docs](./skills/engineering/grill-with-docs/SKILL.md)** — Grilling session that also builds your project's domain model, sharpening terminology and updating `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs inline.
 - **[triage](./skills/engineering/triage/SKILL.md)** — Move issues through a state machine of triage roles.
 - **[improve-codebase-architecture](./skills/engineering/improve-codebase-architecture/SKILL.md)** — Scan a codebase for deepening opportunities, present them as a visual HTML report, then grill through whichever one you pick.
 - **[setup-matt-pocock-skills](./skills/engineering/setup-matt-pocock-skills/SKILL.md)** — Configure this repo for the engineering skills (issue tracker, triage labels, domain doc layout). Run once per repo before using the other engineering skills.
 - **[to-issues](./skills/engineering/to-issues/SKILL.md)** — Break any plan, spec, or PRD into independently-grabbable issues using vertical slices.
 - **[to-prd](./skills/engineering/to-prd/SKILL.md)** — Turn the current conversation into a PRD and publish it to the issue tracker. No interview — just synthesizes what you've already discussed.
- **[zoom-out](./skills/engineering/zoom-out/SKILL.md)** — Ask the agent to zoom out a level and map the relevant modules and callers on an unfamiliar section of code.
- **[prototype](./skills/engineering/prototype/SKILL.md)** — Build a throwaway prototype to flesh out a design — either a runnable terminal app for state/business-logic questions, or several radically different UI variations toggleable from one route.

-**Skills**
+**Model-invoked**

+- **[prototype](./skills/engineering/prototype/SKILL.md)** — Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question — a runnable terminal app for state/logic questions, or several radically different UI variations toggleable from one route.
 - **[diagnosing-bugs](./skills/engineering/diagnosing-bugs/SKILL.md)** — Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions: reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test.
 - **[tdd](./skills/engineering/tdd/SKILL.md)** — Test-driven development with a red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time.
 - **[domain-modeling](./skills/engineering/domain-modeling/SKILL.md)** — Actively build and sharpen a project's domain model — challenge terms against the glossary, stress-test with edge-case scenarios, and update `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs inline.
@@ -170,15 +169,14 @@ Skills I use daily for code work.

 General workflow tools, not code-specific.

-**Commands**
+**User-invoked**

- **[caveman](./skills/productivity/caveman/SKILL.md)** — Ultra-compressed communication mode. Cuts token usage ~75% by dropping filler while keeping full technical accuracy.
 - **[grill-me](./skills/productivity/grill-me/SKILL.md)** — Get relentlessly interviewed about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved.
 - **[handoff](./skills/productivity/handoff/SKILL.md)** — Compact the current conversation into a handoff document so another agent can continue the work.
 - **[teach](./skills/productivity/teach/SKILL.md)** — Teach the user a new skill or concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful teaching workspace.
- **[write-a-skill](./skills/productivity/write-a-skill/SKILL.md)** — Create new skills with proper structure, progressive disclosure, and bundled resources.
+- **[writing-great-skills](./skills/productivity/writing-great-skills/SKILL.md)** — Reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable.

-**Skills**
+**Model-invoked**

 - **[grilling](./skills/productivity/grilling/SKILL.md)** — Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved. The reusable loop behind `grill-me` and `grill-with-docs`.

@@ -1,16 +0,0 @@
-# Commands vs skills
-
-Every `SKILL.md` in this repo is one of two kinds. The test for "is it a skill" is: _could the model usefully reach for this autonomously?_ Reuse is the reason to extract a skill, not the test.
-
- **Command** — _always_ user-invoked. Set `disable-model-invocation: true` in the frontmatter. The `description` is **human-facing**: a one-line summary read by a person browsing slash-commands. Strip trigger lists ("Use when the user says…") from command descriptions. A command may invoke skills, but **never another command**.
- **Skill** — invocable by **model or user**. The `description` is **model-facing** and keeps rich trigger phrasing ("Use when the user wants…, mentions…, asks for…") so auto-invocation fires. Do not set `disable-model-invocation`.
-
-Bucket `README.md`s and the top-level `README.md` group entries into **Commands** and **Skills**.
-
-## Dependencies between them
-
-Dependencies are expressed as **`/skill`-style prose invocation** ("Run the `/grilling` skill"), not deep `../other-skill/FILE.md` cross-references. Shared reference docs live inside the skill that owns them; other skills reach that material by invoking the skill, not by linking across folders.
-
-## Passive vs active domain work
-
-Merely _reading_ `CONTEXT.md` for vocabulary is a one-line prose pointer, not the `domain-modeling` skill. Only the active build/sharpen discipline (challenge terms, edge-case scenarios, write ADRs, update `CONTEXT.md` inline) is `domain-modeling`.
@@ -0,0 +1,59 @@
+Quickstart:
+
+```bash
+npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=to-prd
+```
+
+```bash
+npx skills update to-prd
+```
+
+[Source](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/engineering/to-prd)
+
+## What it does
+
+`to-prd` turns the current conversation and your codebase understanding into a product requirements document, then publishes it to your issue tracker.
+
+The load-bearing constraint: it does **not** interview you again. By the time you reach for it, the alignment work is done — `to-prd` synthesises what is already known rather than asking a fresh round of questions.
+
+## When to reach for it
+
+You invoke this by typing `/to-prd` — the agent won't reach for it on its own.
+
+Reach for it once a change has been talked through and the domain language is settled, and you want that shared understanding written down as a spec before any code is written. If you *haven't* aligned yet, grill first — for that, use [grill-with-docs](https://aihero.dev/skills-grill-with-docs). To split the finished PRD into tickets, use [to-issues](https://aihero.dev/skills-to-issues).
+
+## Prerequisites
+
+`to-prd` publishes into your issue tracker, so [setup-matt-pocock-skills](https://aihero.dev/skills-setup-matt-pocock-skills) must have configured the tracker and triage labels for this repo first. It applies the `ready-for-agent` label itself — no separate triage pass needed.
+
+## What the PRD includes
+
+- **Problem statement** — what is broken or missing, and why it's worth solving, in the project's own vocabulary.
+- **Solution** — the shape of the fix at a high level, before any implementation detail.
+- **User stories** — an extensive, numbered list of the concrete behaviours the change must support, each one independently checkable.
+- **Implementation decisions** — the choices already settled during the conversation, so they aren't relitigated later.
+- **Testing decisions** — the seams the feature will be tested at, and what "done" looks like.
+- **Out-of-scope items** — what this change deliberately does *not* cover, to keep the ticket bounded.
+- **Further notes** — anything else worth carrying forward that doesn't fit the sections above.
+
+## Deep modules
+
+Before writing the PRD, `to-prd` sketches the **seams** at which the feature will be tested and looks for **deep module** opportunities — a lot of functionality hidden behind a small, stable interface. It prefers existing seams to new ones and the highest seam possible, ideally just one across the whole change.
+
+That matters for agentic development: a good interface gives tests something durable to target, so the code underneath can change without the tests moving.
+
+## It's working if
+
+- It starts writing the PRD instead of asking you a fresh round of questions.
+- It checks the seams with you before writing, and proposes as few as possible.
+- The PRD comes back in your project's domain vocabulary, not generic boilerplate.
+
+## Where it fits
+
+`to-prd` is a step in the main build chain:
+
+```txt
+grill-with-docs → to-prd → to-issues → tdd
+```
+
+Reach for it after the plan and domain language are resolved, and before you break the work into implementation tickets. Its key neighbours are [grill-with-docs](https://aihero.dev/skills-grill-with-docs), which sharpens the context so the PRD is precise, and [to-issues](https://aihero.dev/skills-to-issues), which turns the PRD into independently-grabbable issues for [tdd](https://aihero.dev/skills-tdd) to implement. When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, [ask-matt](https://aihero.dev/skills-ask-matt) routes you.
@@ -0,0 +1,20 @@
+{
+  "name": "mattpocock-skills",
+  "version": "1.0.1",
+  "private": true,
+  "description": "Matt Pocock's agent skills for real engineering",
+  "repository": {
+    "type": "git",
+    "url": "https://github.com/mattpocock/skills"
+  },
+  "license": "MIT",
+  "scripts": {
+    "changeset": "changeset",
+    "version": "changeset version"
+  },
+  "devDependencies": {
+    "@changesets/changelog-github": "^0.7.0",
+    "@changesets/cli": "^2.30.0"
+  },
+  "packageManager": "npm@10.9.4"
+}
@@ -1,38 +1,56 @@
 #!/usr/bin/env bash
 set -euo pipefail

-# Links all skills in the repository to ~/.claude/skills, so that
-# they can be used by the local Claude CLI.
+# NOTE: This is a dev-only script, intended for use by maintainers of this repo.
+# It is not a supported installer. Modifications to it — or requests for
+# modifications — will not be approved.
+#
+# Links all skills in the repository into the local skill directories used by
+# each agent harness:
+#   - ~/.claude/skills  — Claude Code
+#   - ~/.agents/skills  — pi and other Agent-Skills-standard harnesses
+# Each entry is a symlink into this repo, so a `git pull` is all that's needed
+# to keep installed skills up to date.

 REPO="$(cd "$(dirname "$0")/.." && pwd)"
-DEST="$HOME/.claude/skills"
+DESTS=("$HOME/.claude/skills" "$HOME/.agents/skills")

-# If ~/.claude/skills is a symlink that resolves into this repo, we'd end up
-# writing the per-skill symlinks back into the repo's own skills/ tree. Detect
-# and bail out instead of polluting the working copy.
-if [ -L "$DEST" ]; then
-  resolved="$(readlink -f "$DEST")"
-  case "$resolved" in
-    "$REPO"|"$REPO"/*)
-      echo "error: $DEST is a symlink into this repo ($resolved)." >&2
-      echo "Remove it (rm \"$DEST\") and re-run; the script will recreate it as a real dir." >&2
-      exit 1
-      ;;
-  esac
-fi
-
-mkdir -p "$DEST"
-
-find "$REPO/skills" -name SKILL.md -not -path '*/node_modules/*' -not -path '*/deprecated/*' -print0 |
+# Collect the repo's skills once, link into every destination.
+names=()
+srcs=()
 while IFS= read -r -d '' skill_md; do
  src="$(dirname "$skill_md")"
-  name="$(basename "$src")"
-  target="$DEST/$name"
+  names+=("$(basename "$src")")
+  srcs+=("$src")
+done < <(find "$REPO/skills" -name SKILL.md -not -path '*/node_modules/*' -not -path '*/deprecated/*' -print0)

-  if [ -e "$target" ] && [ ! -L "$target" ]; then
-    rm -rf "$target"
+for DEST in "${DESTS[@]}"; do
+  # If $DEST is a symlink that resolves into this repo, we'd end up writing the
+  # per-skill symlinks back into the repo's own skills/ tree. Detect and bail
+  # out instead of polluting the working copy.
+  if [ -L "$DEST" ]; then
+    resolved="$(readlink -f "$DEST")"
+    case "$resolved" in
+      "$REPO"|"$REPO"/*)
+        echo "error: $DEST is a symlink into this repo ($resolved)." >&2
+        echo "Remove it (rm \"$DEST\") and re-run; the script will recreate it as a real dir." >&2
+        exit 1
+        ;;
+    esac
  fi

-  ln -sfn "$src" "$target"
-  echo "linked $name -> $src"
+  mkdir -p "$DEST"
+
+  for i in "${!names[@]}"; do
+    name="${names[$i]}"
+    src="${srcs[$i]}"
+    target="$DEST/$name"
+
+    if [ -e "$target" ] && [ ! -L "$target" ]; then
+      rm -rf "$target"
+    fi
+
+    ln -sfn "$src" "$target"
+    echo "linked $name -> $src ($DEST)"
+  done
 done
@@ -2,22 +2,23 @@

 Skills I use daily for code work.

-## Commands
+## User-invoked

-User-invoked entry points (`disable-model-invocation: true`).
+Reachable only when you type them (`disable-model-invocation: true`).

+- **[ask-matt](./ask-matt/SKILL.md)** — Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the user-invoked skills in this repo.
 - **[grill-with-docs](./grill-with-docs/SKILL.md)** — Grilling session that also builds your project's domain model, sharpening terminology and updating `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs inline.
 - **[triage](./triage/SKILL.md)** — Move issues through a state machine of triage roles.
 - **[improve-codebase-architecture](./improve-codebase-architecture/SKILL.md)** — Scan a codebase for deepening opportunities, present them as a visual HTML report, then grill through whichever one you pick.
 - **[setup-matt-pocock-skills](./setup-matt-pocock-skills/SKILL.md)** — Configure this repo for the engineering skills (issue tracker, triage labels, domain doc layout). Run once per repo.
 - **[to-issues](./to-issues/SKILL.md)** — Break any plan, spec, or PRD into independently-grabbable issues using vertical slices.
 - **[to-prd](./to-prd/SKILL.md)** — Turn the current conversation into a PRD and publish it to the issue tracker.
- **[zoom-out](./zoom-out/SKILL.md)** — Ask the agent to zoom out a level and map the relevant modules and callers.
- **[prototype](./prototype/SKILL.md)** — Build a throwaway prototype — a runnable terminal app for state/logic questions, or several toggleable UI variations.

-## Skills
+## Model-invoked

-Model- or user-invocable (rich trigger phrasing so the model can reach for them).
+Model- or user-reachable (rich trigger phrasing so the model can reach for them).
+
+- **[prototype](./prototype/SKILL.md)** — Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question: a runnable terminal app for state/logic, or several toggleable UI variations.

 - **[diagnosing-bugs](./diagnosing-bugs/SKILL.md)** — Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions: reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test.
 - **[tdd](./tdd/SKILL.md)** — Test-driven development with a red-green-refactor loop. Builds features or fixes bugs one vertical slice at a time.
@@ -0,0 +1,61 @@
+---
+name: ask-matt
+description: Ask which skill or flow fits your situation. A router over the user-invoked skills in this repo.
+disable-model-invocation: true
+---
+
+# Ask Matt
+
+You don't remember every skill, so ask.
+
+A **flow** is a path through the skills. Most paths run along one **main flow**, and two **on-ramps** merge onto it. Everything else is standalone.
+
+## The main flow: idea → ship
+
+The route most work travels. You have an idea and want it built.
+
+1. **`/grill-with-docs`** — sharpen the idea by interview. Start here when you **have a codebase**: it's stateful, retaining what it learns in `CONTEXT.md` and ADRs. (No codebase? Use `/grill-me` — see Standalone.)
+2. **Branch — can you settle every question in conversation?** If a question needs a runnable answer (state, business logic, a UI you have to see), detour through a prototype, bridged by **`/handoff`** in both directions (see Crossing sessions):
+   - **`/handoff`** out, then open a fresh session against that file,
+   - **`/prototype`** to answer the question with throwaway code,
+   - **`/handoff`** back what you learned, and reference it from the original idea thread.
+3. **Branch — is this a multi-session build?**
+   - **Yes** → **`/to-prd`** (turn the thread into a PRD) → **`/to-issues`** (split the PRD into independently-grabbable issues). Because the issues are independent, **clear context between each one**: start a fresh session per issue and kick off **`/implement`** by passing it the PRD and the single issue to work on.
+   - **No** → **`/implement`** right here, in the same context window.
+
+### Context hygiene
+
+Keep steps 1–3 in **one unbroken context window** — don't compact or clear until after `/to-issues` — so the grilling, PRD, and issues all build on the same thinking. Each `/implement` then starts fresh, working from the issue.
+
+The limit on this is the **[smart zone](https://www.aihero.dev/ai-coding-dictionary/smart-zone)**: the window (~120k tokens on state-of-the-art models) within which the model still reasons sharply. If a session approaches it before `/to-issues`, don't push on degraded — `/handoff` and continue in a fresh thread.
+
+## On-ramps
+
+A starting situation that generates work, then merges onto the main flow.
+
+- **Bugs and requests piling up** → **`/triage`**. It moves issues through triage roles and produces agent-ready issues, which **`/implement`** later picks up.
+
+  Triage is only for issues **you didn't create** — bug reports, incoming feature requests, anything that arrives raw. Issues that `/to-issues` produced are already agent-ready, so **don't triage them**.
+
+## Codebase health
+
+Not feature work — upkeep.
+
+- **`/improve-codebase-architecture`** — run whenever you have a spare moment to keep the codebase good for agents to operate in. It surfaces deepening opportunities; picking one _generates an idea_ you can take into the main flow at `/grill-with-docs`.
+
+## Crossing sessions
+
+- **`/handoff`** — when a thread is full or you need to branch off (e.g. into a `/prototype` session), this compacts the conversation into a markdown file. You don't continue in place — you **open a new session and reference that file** to carry the context across. It's the bridge between context windows, in either direction. Use it when you want a **fresh session** but need the **current conversation preserved**.
+- **`/compact`** (built-in) — stay in the **same conversation**, letting the earlier turns be summarized. Use it at **intentional breaks between phases**, when you don't mind losing the verbatim history. Don't compact mid-phase — the agent can lose its way. `/handoff` forks; `/compact` continues.
+
+## Standalone
+
+Off the main flow entirely.
+
+- **`/grill-me`** — the same relentless interview as `/grill-with-docs`, but for when you have **no codebase**. Stateless: it saves nothing locally, builds no `CONTEXT.md`. Reach for it to sharpen any plan or design that doesn't live in a repo.
+- **`/teach`** — learn a concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful workspace.
+- **`/writing-great-skills`** — reference for writing and editing skills well.
+
+## Precondition
+
+**`/setup-matt-pocock-skills`** — run before your first engineering flow to configure the issue tracker, triage labels, and doc layout the other skills assume. Custom issue trackers also work.
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: codebase-design
-description: Shared discipline and vocabulary for designing deep modules — a lot of behaviour behind a small interface, placed at a clean seam, testable through that interface. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, choose between interface alternatives, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.
+description: Shared vocabulary for designing deep modules. Use when the user wants to design or improve a module's interface, find deepening opportunities, decide where a seam goes, make code more testable or AI-navigable, or when another skill needs the deep-module vocabulary.
 ---

 # Codebase Design
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: diagnosing-bugs
-description: Disciplined diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions. Reproduce → minimise → hypothesise → instrument → fix → regression-test. Use when user says "diagnose this" / "debug this", reports a bug, says something is broken/throwing/failing, or describes a performance regression.
+description: Diagnosis loop for hard bugs and performance regressions. Use when the user says "diagnose"/"debug this", or reports something broken/throwing/failing/slow.
 ---

 # Diagnosing Bugs
@@ -11,7 +11,7 @@ When exploring the codebase, read `CONTEXT.md` (if it exists) to get a clear men

 ## Phase 1 — Build a feedback loop

-**This is the skill.** Everything else is mechanical. If you have a fast, deterministic, agent-runnable pass/fail signal for the bug, you will find the cause — bisection, hypothesis-testing, and instrumentation all just consume that signal. If you don't have one, no amount of staring at code will save you.
+**This is the skill.** Everything else is mechanical. If you have a **tight** pass/fail signal for the bug — one that goes red on _this_ bug — you will find the cause; bisection, hypothesis-testing, and instrumentation all just consume it. If you don't have one, no amount of staring at code will save you.

 Spend disproportionate effort here. **Be aggressive. Be creative. Refuse to give up.**

@@ -30,15 +30,15 @@ Spend disproportionate effort here. **Be aggressive. Be creative. Refuse to give

 Build the right feedback loop, and the bug is 90% fixed.

-### Iterate on the loop itself
+### Tighten the loop

-Treat the loop as a product. Once you have _a_ loop, ask:
+Treat the loop as a product. Once you have _a_ loop, **tighten** it:

 - Can I make it faster? (Cache setup, skip unrelated init, narrow the test scope.)
 - Can I make the signal sharper? (Assert on the specific symptom, not "didn't crash".)
 - Can I make it more deterministic? (Pin time, seed RNG, isolate filesystem, freeze network.)

-A 30-second flaky loop is barely better than no loop. A 2-second deterministic loop is a debugging superpower.
+A 30-second flaky loop is barely better than no loop; a 2-second deterministic one is tight — a debugging superpower.

 ### Non-deterministic bugs

@@ -48,11 +48,20 @@ The goal is not a clean repro but a **higher reproduction rate**. Loop the trigg

 Stop and say so explicitly. List what you tried. Ask the user for: (a) access to whatever environment reproduces it, (b) a captured artifact (HAR file, log dump, core dump, screen recording with timestamps), or (c) permission to add temporary production instrumentation. Do **not** proceed to hypothesise without a loop.

-Do not proceed to Phase 2 until you have a loop you believe in.
+### Completion criterion — a tight loop that goes red

-## Phase 2 — Reproduce
+Phase 1 is done when the loop is **tight** and **red-capable**: you can name **one command** — a script path, a test invocation, a curl — that you have **already run at least once** (paste the invocation and its output), and that is:

-Run the loop. Watch the bug appear.
+- [ ] **Red-capable** — it drives the actual bug code path and asserts the **user's exact symptom**, so it can go red on this bug and green once fixed. Not "runs without erroring" — it must be able to _catch this specific bug_.
+- [ ] **Deterministic** — same verdict every run (flaky bugs: a pinned, high reproduction rate, per above).
+- [ ] **Fast** — seconds, not minutes.
+- [ ] **Agent-runnable** — you can run it unattended; a human in the loop only via `scripts/hitl-loop.template.sh`.
+
+If you catch yourself reading code to build a theory before this command exists, **stop — jumping straight to a hypothesis is the exact failure this skill prevents.** No red-capable command, no Phase 2.
+
+## Phase 2 — Reproduce + minimise
+
+Run the loop. Watch it go red — the bug appears.

 Confirm:

@@ -60,7 +69,15 @@ Confirm:
 - [ ] The failure is reproducible across multiple runs (or, for non-deterministic bugs, reproducible at a high enough rate to debug against).
 - [ ] You have captured the exact symptom (error message, wrong output, slow timing) so later phases can verify the fix actually addresses it.

-Do not proceed until you reproduce the bug.
+### Minimise
+
+Once it's red, shrink the repro to the **smallest scenario that still goes red**. Cut inputs, callers, config, data, and steps **one at a time**, re-running the loop after each cut — keep only what's load-bearing for the failure.
+
+Why bother: a minimal repro shrinks the hypothesis space in Phase 3 (fewer moving parts left to suspect) and becomes the clean regression test in Phase 5.
+
+Done when **every remaining element is load-bearing** — removing any one of them makes the loop go green.
+
+Do not proceed until you have reproduced **and** minimised.

 ## Phase 3 — Hypothesise

@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: domain-modeling
-description: Actively build and sharpen a project's domain model while you design — challenge fuzzy or conflicting terms against the glossary, stress-test concepts with concrete edge-case scenarios, cross-check claims against the code, and update CONTEXT.md and ADRs inline as decisions crystallise. Use when the user wants to refine domain terminology, build a ubiquitous language, pin down what a term really means, record a hard-won architectural decision, or when another skill needs to actively maintain the domain model.
+description: Build and sharpen a project's domain model. Use when the user wants to pin down domain terminology or a ubiquitous language, record an architectural decision, or when another skill needs to maintain the domain model.
 ---

 # Domain Modeling
@@ -1,7 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: prototype
-description: Build a throwaway prototype to flesh out a design — a runnable terminal app for state/business-logic questions, or several radically different UI variations toggleable from one route.
-disable-model-invocation: true
+description: Build a throwaway prototype to answer a design question. Use when the user wants to sanity-check whether a state model or logic feels right, or explore what a UI should look like.
 ---

 # Prototype
@@ -44,6 +44,12 @@ Default posture: these skills were designed for GitHub. If a `git remote` points
 - **Local markdown** — issues live as files under `.scratch/<feature>/` in this repo (good for solo projects or repos without a remote)
 - **Other** (Jira, Linear, etc.) — ask the user to describe the workflow in one paragraph; the skill will record it as freeform prose

+If — and only if — the user picked **GitHub** or **GitLab**, ask one follow-up:
+
+> Explainer: Open-source repos often receive feature requests as pull requests, not just issues — a PR is an issue with attached code. If you turn this on, `/triage` pulls *external* PRs into the same queue and runs them through the same labels and states as issues (collaborators' in-flight PRs are left alone). Leave it off if PRs aren't a request surface for you.
+
+- **PRs as a request surface** — yes / no (default: no). Record the answer in `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`. For local-markdown and other trackers, skip this question — there are no PRs.
+
 **Section B — Triage label vocabulary.**

 > Explainer: When the `triage` skill processes an incoming issue, it moves it through a state machine — needs evaluation, waiting on reporter, ready for an AFK agent to pick up, ready for a human, or won't fix. To do that, it needs to apply labels (or the equivalent in your issue tracker) that match strings *you've actually configured*. If your repo already uses different label names (e.g. `bug:triage` instead of `needs-triage`), map them here so the skill applies the right ones instead of creating duplicates.
@@ -95,7 +101,7 @@ The block:

 ### Issue tracker

-[one-line summary of where issues are tracked]. See `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`.
+[one-line summary of where issues are tracked, plus whether external PRs are a triage surface]. See `docs/agents/issue-tracker.md`.

 ### Triage labels

@@ -13,6 +13,18 @@ Issues and PRDs for this repo live as GitHub issues. Use the `gh` CLI for all op

 Infer the repo from `git remote -v` — `gh` does this automatically when run inside a clone.

+## Pull requests as a triage surface
+
+**PRs as a request surface: no.** _(Set to `yes` if this repo treats external PRs as feature requests; `/triage` reads this flag.)_
+
+When set to `yes`, PRs run through the same labels and states as issues, using the `gh pr` equivalents:
+
+- **Read a PR**: `gh pr view <number> --comments` and `gh pr diff <number>` for the diff.
+- **List external PRs for triage**: `gh pr list --state open --json number,title,body,labels,author,authorAssociation,comments` then keep only `authorAssociation` of `CONTRIBUTOR`, `FIRST_TIME_CONTRIBUTOR`, or `NONE` (drop `OWNER`/`MEMBER`/`COLLABORATOR`).
+- **Comment / label / close**: `gh pr comment`, `gh pr edit --add-label`/`--remove-label`, `gh pr close`.
+
+GitHub shares one number space across issues and PRs, so a bare `#42` may be either — resolve with `gh pr view 42` and fall back to `gh issue view 42`.
+
 ## When a skill says "publish to the issue tracker"

 Create a GitHub issue.
@@ -14,6 +14,18 @@ Issues and PRDs for this repo live as GitLab issues. Use the [`glab`](https://gi

 Infer the repo from `git remote -v` — `glab` does this automatically when run inside a clone.

+## Merge requests as a triage surface
+
+**MRs as a request surface: no.** _(Set to `yes` if this repo treats external merge requests as feature requests; `/triage` reads this flag.)_
+
+When set to `yes`, MRs run through the same labels and states as issues, using the `glab mr` equivalents:
+
+- **Read an MR**: `glab mr view <number> --comments` and `glab mr diff <number>` for the diff.
+- **List external MRs for triage**: `glab mr list -F json`, then keep only MRs whose author is not a project member/owner (a contributor's MR, not a maintainer's in-flight work).
+- **Comment / label / close**: `glab mr note`, `glab mr update --label`/`--unlabel`, `glab mr close`.
+
+Unlike GitHub, GitLab numbers issues and MRs separately, so `#42` is unambiguous once you know which surface the maintainer means.
+
 ## When a skill says "publish to the issue tracker"

 Create a GitLab issue.
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: tdd
-description: Test-driven development with red-green-refactor loop. Use when user wants to build features or fix bugs using TDD, mentions "red-green-refactor", wants integration tests, or asks for test-first development.
+description: Test-driven development. Use when the user wants to build features or fix bugs test-first, mentions "red-green-refactor", or wants integration tests.
 ---

 # Test-Driven Development
@@ -13,6 +13,8 @@ description: Test-driven development with red-green-refactor loop. Use when user

 **Bad tests** are coupled to implementation. They mock internal collaborators, test private methods, or verify through external means (like querying a database directly instead of using the interface). The warning sign: your test breaks when you refactor, but behavior hasn't changed. If you rename an internal function and tests fail, those tests were testing implementation, not behavior.

+**Tautological tests** restate the implementation inside the assertion, so they pass by construction and give zero confidence. When the expected value is computed the way the code computes it — `expect(add(a, b)).toBe(a + b)`, snapshotting a figure you derived by hand the same way the code does, asserting a constant equals itself — the test can never disagree with the code: break the code wrong and the assertion breaks wrong with it. The expected value must come from an independent source of truth — a known-good literal, a worked example, the spec.
+
 See [tests.md](tests.md) for examples and [mocking.md](mocking.md) for mocking guidelines.

 ## Anti-Pattern: Horizontal Slices
@@ -103,6 +105,7 @@ After all tests pass, look for [refactor candidates](refactoring.md):
 [ ] Test describes behavior, not implementation
 [ ] Test uses public interface only
 [ ] Test would survive internal refactor
+[ ] Expected values are independent literals, not recomputed from the code
 [ ] Code is minimal for this test
 [ ] No speculative features added
 ```
@@ -59,3 +59,19 @@ test("createUser makes user retrievable", async () => {
  expect(retrieved.name).toBe("Alice");
 });
 ```
+
+**Tautological tests**: Expected value restates the implementation, so the test passes by construction.
+
+```typescript
+// BAD: Expected value is recomputed the way the code computes it
+test("calculateTotal sums line items", () => {
+  const items = [{ price: 10 }, { price: 5 }];
+  const expected = items.reduce((sum, i) => sum + i.price, 0);
+  expect(calculateTotal(items)).toBe(expected);
+});
+
+// GOOD: Expected value is an independent, known literal
+test("calculateTotal sums line items", () => {
+  expect(calculateTotal([{ price: 10 }, { price: 5 }])).toBe(15);
+});
+```
@@ -1,6 +1,8 @@
 # Writing Agent Briefs

-An agent brief is a structured comment posted on a GitHub issue when it moves to `ready-for-agent`. It is the authoritative specification that an AFK agent will work from. The original issue body and discussion are context — the agent brief is the contract.
+An agent brief is a structured comment posted on a GitHub issue or PR when it moves to `ready-for-agent`. It is the authoritative specification that an AFK agent will work from. The original body and discussion are context — the agent brief is the contract.
+
+The brief states **what the agent should do**, which stretches to both surfaces: for an issue, that's building the change from nothing; for a PR, it's what's left to do *to the existing diff* — finish it, close gaps, address review points. Same principles either way; the PR example below shows the difference.

 ## Principles

@@ -143,6 +145,43 @@ checked for matches.
 - Bug reports (only enhancement rejections go to `.out-of-scope/`)
 ```

+### Good agent brief (PR)
+
+For a PR, "Current behavior" describes the state of the diff, and the brief asks the agent to finish or fix it rather than build from scratch.
+
+```markdown
+## Agent Brief
+
+**Category:** enhancement
+**Summary:** Finish the contributor's `--json` output flag for `triage list`
+
+**Current behavior:**
+The PR adds a `--json` flag that serializes the issue list to JSON. The happy
+path works and the diff matches the project's command structure. Two gaps
+remain: errors are still printed as human text (not JSON), and the new flag has
+no test coverage.
+
+**Desired behavior:**
+With `--json`, all output — including errors — is well-formed JSON on stdout,
+and the command's exit codes are unchanged. The existing human-readable output
+is untouched when the flag is absent.
+
+**Key interfaces:**
+- The command's error path should emit `{ "error": string }` under `--json`
+  instead of the plain-text error
+- Reuse the existing serializer the PR already added; don't introduce a second
+
+**Acceptance criteria:**
+- [ ] `triage list --json` emits valid JSON for both success and error cases
+- [ ] Exit codes match the non-JSON command
+- [ ] A test covers the `--json` success output and one error case
+- [ ] Default (non-JSON) output is byte-for-byte unchanged
+
+**Out of scope:**
+- Adding `--json` to any other command
+- Changing the JSON shape of the success payload the PR already defined
+```
+
 ### Bad agent brief

 ```markdown
@@ -83,7 +83,11 @@ The maintainer may:

 ## When to write to `.out-of-scope/`

-Only when an **enhancement** (not a bug) is rejected as `wontfix`. The flow:
+Only when an **enhancement** (not a bug) is *rejected* as `wontfix`. This applies to enhancement PRs exactly as it does to issues — a rejected PR is recorded here so the same request doesn't return as fresh code.
+
+Do **not** write here when something is closed as `wontfix` because it's **already implemented**. That's a built feature, not a rejected one; recording it would poison the dedup checks with false rejections. Instead, the closing comment points to where the feature already lives.
+
+The flow:

 1. Maintainer decides a feature request is out of scope
 2. Check if a matching `.out-of-scope/` file already exists
@@ -1,6 +1,6 @@
 ---
 name: triage
-description: Move issues through a state machine of triage roles — categorise, reproduce, grill if needed, and write agent-ready briefs.
+description: Move issues and external PRs through a state machine of triage roles — categorise, verify, grill if needed, and write agent-ready briefs.
 disable-model-invocation: true
 ---

@@ -8,6 +8,8 @@ disable-model-invocation: true

 Move issues on the project issue tracker through a small state machine of triage roles.

+If this repo treats external pull requests as a request surface (see the issue-tracker config), triage covers them too: **a PR is an issue with attached code** — same roles, same states, same machine, with a few deltas marked "for a PR" below. Resolve a bare `#42` to an issue or PR per the tracker config.
+
 Every comment or issue posted to the issue tracker during triage **must** start with this disclaimer:

 ```
@@ -34,6 +36,8 @@ Five **state** roles:
 - `ready-for-human` — needs human implementation
 - `wontfix` — will not be actioned

+For a PR, the same states read against the attached code: `ready-for-agent` means a brief is attached and an agent should take the next step on the diff; `ready-for-human` means it's ready for a human to merge.
+
 Every triaged issue should carry exactly one category role and one state role. If state roles conflict, flag it and ask the maintainer before doing anything else.

 These are canonical role names — the actual label strings used in the issue tracker may differ. The mapping should have been provided to you - run `/setup-matt-pocock-skills` if not.
@@ -45,7 +49,7 @@ State transitions: an unlabeled issue normally goes to `needs-triage` first; fro
 The maintainer invokes `/triage` and describes what they want in natural language. Interpret the request and act. Examples:

 - "Show me anything that needs my attention"
- "Let's look at #42"
+- "Let's look at #42" (issue or PR)
 - "Move #42 to ready-for-agent"
 - "What's ready for agents to pick up?"

@@ -57,24 +61,28 @@ Query the issue tracker and present three buckets, oldest first:
 2. **`needs-triage`** — evaluation in progress.
 3. **`needs-info` with reporter activity since the last triage notes** — needs re-evaluation.

-Show counts and a one-line summary per issue. Let the maintainer pick.
+When PRs are in scope, include external PRs in these buckets and tag each line `[PR]` or `[issue]`. Discovery surfaces only *external* PRs (the tracker config defines who counts as external) — a collaborator's in-flight PR is not triage work. This filter is discovery-only; an explicitly named PR is always triaged regardless of author.

-## Triage a specific issue
+Show counts and a one-line summary per item. Let the maintainer pick.

-1. **Gather context.** Read the full issue (body, comments, labels, reporter, dates). Parse any prior triage notes so you don't re-ask resolved questions. Explore the codebase using the project's domain glossary, respecting ADRs in the area. Read `.out-of-scope/*.md` and surface any prior rejection that resembles this issue.
+## Triage a specific issue or PR

-2. **Recommend.** Tell the maintainer your category and state recommendation with reasoning, plus a brief codebase summary relevant to the issue. Wait for direction.
+1. **Gather context.** Read the full issue or PR (body, comments, labels, author, dates; for a PR, the diff too). Parse any prior triage notes so you don't re-ask resolved questions. Explore the codebase using the project's domain glossary, respecting ADRs in the area. Run two checks against the codebase: (a) **redundancy** — search for an existing implementation of the requested behavior by domain concept (not just the request's wording), and report where you looked. If found, it's an already-implemented `wontfix` (step 5). (b) **prior rejection** — read `.out-of-scope/*.md` and surface any that resembles this request.

-3. **Reproduce (bugs only).** Before any grilling, attempt reproduction: read the reporter's steps, trace the relevant code, run tests or commands. Report what happened — successful repro with code path, failed repro, or insufficient detail (a strong `needs-info` signal). A confirmed repro makes a much stronger agent brief.
+2. **Recommend.** Tell the maintainer your category and state recommendation with reasoning, plus a brief codebase summary relevant to the request — including whether it's already implemented. Wait for direction.

-4. **Grill (if needed).** If the issue needs fleshing out, run the `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling` skills together — grill the issue into shape one question at a time, sharpening domain terms and updating `CONTEXT.md`/ADRs inline as decisions land.
+3. **Verify the claim.** Before any grilling, check that the claim holds up. For a bug, reproduce it from the reporter's steps. For a PR, confirm the diff does what it claims — check it out, run the relevant tests or commands. Report what happened: confirmed (with code path), failed, or insufficient detail (a strong `needs-info` signal). A confirmed verification makes a much stronger agent brief.
+
+4. **Grill (if needed).** If the request needs fleshing out, run the `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling` skills together — grill it into shape one question at a time, sharpening domain terms and updating `CONTEXT.md`/ADRs inline as decisions land.

 5. **Apply the outcome:**
   - `ready-for-agent` — post an agent brief comment ([AGENT-BRIEF.md](AGENT-BRIEF.md)).
   - `ready-for-human` — same structure as an agent brief, but note why it can't be delegated (judgment calls, external access, design decisions, manual testing).
   - `needs-info` — post triage notes (template below).
-   - `wontfix` (bug) — polite explanation, then close.
-   - `wontfix` (enhancement) — write to `.out-of-scope/`, link to it from a comment, then close ([OUT-OF-SCOPE.md](OUT-OF-SCOPE.md)).
+   - `wontfix` — close, with the comment depending on *why*:
+     - **Already implemented** — the change already exists in the codebase. Point to where it lives; do **not** write to `.out-of-scope/` (that KB is for *rejected* requests, not built ones).
+     - **Rejected (bug)** — polite explanation, then close.
+     - **Rejected (enhancement)** — write to `.out-of-scope/`, link to it from a comment, then close ([OUT-OF-SCOPE.md](OUT-OF-SCOPE.md)).
   - `needs-triage` — apply the role. Optional comment if there's partial progress.

 ## Quick state override
@@ -101,4 +109,4 @@ Capture everything resolved during grilling under "established so far" so the wo

 ## Resuming a previous session

-If prior triage notes exist on the issue, read them, check whether the reporter has answered any outstanding questions, and present an updated picture before continuing. Don't re-ask resolved questions.
+If prior triage notes exist on the issue or PR, read them, check whether the reporter has answered any outstanding questions, and present an updated picture before continuing. Don't re-ask resolved questions.
@@ -1,7 +0,0 @@
---
-name: zoom-out
-description: Ask the agent to zoom out a level and map the relevant modules and callers using the project's domain language.
-disable-model-invocation: true
---
-
-I don't know this area of code well. Go up a layer of abstraction. Give me a map of all the relevant modules and callers, using the project's domain glossary vocabulary.
@@ -2,7 +2,10 @@

 Skills that are still being developed. They're not ready to ship — expect rough edges, breaking changes, and abandoned experiments. They're excluded from the plugin and the top-level README until they graduate to a stable bucket.

+- **[decision-mapping](./decision-mapping/SKILL.md)** — Turn a loose idea into a sequenced map of investigation tickets, then drive them to resolution one at a time. User-invoked.
+- **[loop-me](./loop-me/SKILL.md)** — Grill yourself into implementable workflow specs over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful workspace. User-invoked.
 - **[review](./review/SKILL.md)** — Review changes since a fixed point along two parallel axes: **Standards** (does the diff follow the repo's coding standards?) and **Spec** (does the diff faithfully implement the originating issue/PRD?).
+- **[wizard](./wizard/SKILL.md)** — Generate an interactive bash wizard that walks a human through a manual procedure (setup, a one-off migration, a state transition) — opening URLs, capturing values, writing `.env` and GitHub Actions secrets. User-invoked.
 - **[writing-beats](./writing-beats/SKILL.md)** — Shape an article as a journey of beats, choose-your-own-adventure style. Pick a starting beat, write only that beat, then pivot to the next, until the article reaches a natural end.
 - **[writing-fragments](./writing-fragments/SKILL.md)** — Grilling session that mines you for fragments — heterogeneous nuggets of writing — and appends them to a single document as raw material for a future article.
 - **[writing-shape](./writing-shape/SKILL.md)** — Take a markdown file of raw material and shape it into an article paragraph by paragraph, arguing format choices at each step.
@@ -0,0 +1,108 @@
+---
+name: decision-mapping
+description: Turn a loose idea into a sequenced map of investigation tickets, then drive them to resolution one at a time.
+disable-model-invocation: true
+---
+
+This skill is invoked when a loose idea requires more than one agent session to turn into a plan. It creates a stateful decision map in a markdown file, and drives the user through a sequence of tickets to resolve the open questions - which may require either prototyping, research or grilling. The map is domain-agnostic: it plans engineering work, course content, or anything else that fits the same shape.
+
+## The Decision Map
+
+The decision map is a single compact Markdown file, one per planning effort, git-tracked alongside the project. It is the canonical artifact — the **whole map is loaded as context into every session**, so it must stay compact.
+
+Assets created during tickets should be linked to from the map, not duplicated within it.
+
+### Structure
+
+Entries ("tickets"), each its own section keyed by a short dash-case slug that
+reads as a mini-title (e.g. `relational-db`, `auth-strategy`, `cache-layer`) —
+terse enough to stay token-efficient, and unique within the map.
+
+```markdown
+## relational-db: Relational Or Non-Relational Database?
+
+Blocked by: <slug>, <slug>
+Status: open | in-progress | resolved
+Type: Research | Prototype | Grilling | Task
+
+### Question
+
+<question-here>
+
+### Answer
+
+<answer-here>
+```
+
+The slug is the canonical id, used in every `Blocked by` edge and prose
+reference; the title after the colon is optional. A ticket
+is **unblocked** when every ticket in its `Blocked by` list is `resolved`. A
+session **claims** its ticket by setting `Status: in-progress` and saving the map
+before any work, so concurrent sessions skip it.
+
+Each ticket must be sized to one 100K token agent session.
+
+## Ticket Types
+
+There are four types of tickets:
+
+- **Research**: Reading documentation, third-party API's, or local resources like knowledge bases. Creates a markdown summary as an asset. Use this when knowledge outside the current working directory is required.
+- **Prototype**: Raise the fidelity of the discussion by making a cheap, rough, concrete artifact to react to — an outline, a rough take, a stub, or UI/logic code via the /prototype skill. Creates the prototype as an asset. Use this when "how should it look" or "how should it behave" is the key question.
+- **Grilling**: Conversation with the agent. Uses the /grilling and /domain-modeling skills. Asks one question at a time. The default case.
+- **Task**: Literal manual work that must be done before the discussion can move forward — nothing to decide, prototype, or research. Moving data from one place to another, signing up for a third-party service, provisioning access. The agent automates it where it can; otherwise it hands the human a precise checklist to do by hand. Resolved when the work is done; the answer records what was done and any resulting facts (credentials location, new URLs, row counts) later tickets depend on.
+
+## Fog of war
+
+The map is _deliberately_ incomplete beyond the frontier. Your job is to investigate the frontier, and to resolve tickets in order to push the frontier forward. Push back the fog of war, one node at a time — until the path to the finish line is clear and no tickets remain.
+
+## Invocation
+
+Two branches. Either way, **every session ends with a [Handoff](#handoff)** — never resolve more than one ticket per session.
+
+### Create the map
+
+User invokes with a loose idea.
+
+1. Run a `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling` session to surface the open decisions. Ask one question at a time.
+2. Write a new decision map — mostly fog, frontier identified, trivially-decidable entries resolved inline.
+3. Handoff. Map-building is one session's work; do not also resolve tickets.
+
+### Work through the map
+
+User invokes with a path to an existing map. A ticket slug is **optional** — without one, you pick the next decision, not the user.
+
+1. Load the **whole map** as context.
+2. Choose the ticket. If the user named one, use it. Otherwise pick the first `open` ticket in document order that is [unblocked](#structure). [Claim it](#structure): set `Status: in-progress` and save before any work.
+3. Resolve it, invoking skills as needed — including any the `## Notes` block names. If in doubt, use `/grilling` and `/domain-modeling`.
+4. Record the answer in the ticket's body and set `Status: resolved`.
+5. Add newly-discovered tickets with correct `Blocked by` edges. If the decisions made invalidate other parts of the map, update or delete those nodes.
+6. Handoff.
+
+The user may run unblocked tickets in parallel, so expect other agents to be editing the map in their own sessions.
+
+## Handoff
+
+End every session by clearing the context and opening one or more fresh sessions. Close with a **Next steps** block the user can copy-paste. Two cases:
+
+**Open tickets remain.** List the currently-unblocked tickets, then give two copy-paste options: a bare command for one session (you pick the next ticket), and one pinned command per unblocked ticket for running them in parallel. Paste one line per fresh window — opening one, some, or all of them.
+
+> **Next steps** — 3 tickets unblocked: `auth-strategy`, `cache-layer`, `rate-limits`.
+> Clear the context, then open fresh sessions.
+>
+> **One session** — resolves the next unblocked ticket:
+> ```
+> Invoke /decision-mapping with the map at <path>.
+> ```
+>
+> **Parallel** — paste one line per window, up to all 3:
+> ```
+> Invoke /decision-mapping with the map at <path>, ticket auth-strategy.
+> Invoke /decision-mapping with the map at <path>, ticket cache-layer.
+> Invoke /decision-mapping with the map at <path>, ticket rate-limits.
+> ```
+
+**No open tickets remain.** The fog is pushed back far enough that the path to the finish line is clear — the map is done. (The initial grilling may also surface no fog at all, in which case there was never a map to build.) Recommend implementing directly, or using `/to-prd` to schedule a multi-session implementation.
+
+## Notes
+
+An optional block declaring the **domain**, any skills every session should `consult`, and freeform standing preferences the planning surfaces.
@@ -0,0 +1,32 @@
+---
+name: loop-me
+description: Grill me about specs for the workflows I want to build, within this workspace.
+disable-model-invocation: true
+argument-hint: "A workflow to design, or nothing to go find one"
+---
+
+Run a stateful `/grilling` session whose only output is **workflow** specs. Use the grilling discipline — relentless, one question at a time, a recommended answer attached to each — aimed at the vocabulary and goal below. Create, edit, and delete specs as the grilling resolves things.
+
+## The loop lens
+
+A **loop** is a recurring pattern in the user's life: their career, their week, their morning, a single repeated activity. Picturing a life as loops within loops reveals how predictable its activities really are — which is what makes them worth **delegating**. Use the lens to find loops worth specifying, and propose ones the user hasn't noticed.
+
+A **workflow** is the spec of one loop, made real. You run a workflow on a loop — the loop is its running instantiation. Workflows live in `workflows/*.md` and are the source of truth.
+
+## Vocabulary
+
+A shared language, reached for only when a workflow calls for it — never a checklist. **Mandate nothing structural**: a workflow needs no AI, no checkpoint, and no schedule unless the grilling shows it does.
+
+- **Trigger** — what fires each run: an **event** (a new email, a new issue) or a **schedule** (every morning). Event-triggering is usually the more efficient.
+- **Checkpoint** — a human-in-the-loop point where the user is asked to verify or decide. Some workflows have none and run autonomously; some use no AI at all.
+- **Push right** — defer the checkpoint as far as it will go. Do maximal work before involving the human, so they are asked once, late, with everything prepared.
+- **Brief** — what a checkpoint presents: a tight, decision-ready summary — what was produced, why, and a link down to the asset itself — never the raw output. The user reads a brief, not a draft. Speed of review is imperative.
+
+## Definition of done
+
+A workflow spec is done when an implementer agent could build it without asking a single question. Grill until then; nothing is done while a question remains.
+
+## The workspace
+
+- `workflows/*.md` — one spec per workflow.
+- `NOTES.md` — raw notes on the user's world: the tools they use, the channels they process, and their own terminology for both. When it is empty or thin, interview them about their world before specifying anything. Sharpen fuzzy terms into canonical ones as they surface, and record them here.
@@ -3,8 +3,6 @@ name: review
 description: Review the changes since a fixed point (commit, branch, tag, or merge-base) along two axes — Standards (does the code follow this repo's documented coding standards?) and Spec (does the code match what the originating issue/PRD asked for?). Runs both reviews in parallel sub-agents and reports them side by side. Use when the user wants to review a branch, a PR, work-in-progress changes, or asks to "review since X".
 ---

-# Review
-
 Two-axis review of the diff between `HEAD` and a fixed point the user supplies:

 - **Standards** — does the code conform to this repo's documented coding standards?
@@ -18,10 +16,12 @@ The issue tracker should have been provided to you — run `/setup-matt-pocock-s

 ### 1. Pin the fixed point

-Whatever the user said is the fixed point — a commit SHA, branch name, tag, `main`, `HEAD~5`, etc. Don't be opinionated; pass it through. If they didn't specify one, ask: "Review against what — a branch, a commit, or `main`?" Don't proceed until you have it.
+Whatever the user said is the fixed point — a commit SHA, branch name, tag, `main`, `HEAD~5`, etc. If they didn't specify one, ask for it.

 Capture the diff command once: `git diff <fixed-point>...HEAD` (three-dot, so the comparison is against the merge-base). Also note the list of commits via `git log <fixed-point>..HEAD --oneline`.

+Before going further, confirm the fixed point resolves (`git rev-parse <fixed-point>`) and the diff is non-empty. A bad ref or empty diff should fail here — not inside two parallel sub-agents.
+
 ### 2. Identify the spec source

 Look for the originating spec, in this order:
@@ -33,16 +33,27 @@ Look for the originating spec, in this order:

 ### 3. Identify the standards sources

-Anything in the repo that documents how code should be written. Common locations:
+Anything in the repo that documents how code should be written, such as `CODING_STANDARDS.md` or `CONTRIBUTING.md`.

- `CLAUDE.md`, `AGENTS.md`
- `CONTRIBUTING.md`
- `CONTEXT.md`, `CONTEXT-MAP.md`, per-context `CONTEXT.md` files
- `docs/adr/` (architectural decisions are standards)
- `.editorconfig`, `eslint.config.*`, `biome.json`, `prettier.config.*`, `tsconfig.json` (machine-enforced standards — note them but don't re-check what tooling already checks)
- Any `STYLE.md`, `STANDARDS.md`, `STYLEGUIDE.md`, or similar at the repo root or under `docs/`
+On top of whatever the repo documents, the Standards axis always carries the **smell baseline** below — a fixed set of Fowler code smells (_Refactoring_, ch.3) that applies even when a repo documents nothing. Two rules bind it:

-Collect the list of files. The **Standards** sub-agent will read them.
+- **The repo overrides.** A documented repo standard always wins; where it endorses something the baseline would flag, suppress the smell.
+- **Always a judgement call.** Each smell is a labelled heuristic ("possible Feature Envy"), never a hard violation — and, like any standard here, skip anything tooling already enforces.
+
+Each smell reads *what it is* → *how to fix*; match it against the diff:
+
+- **Mysterious Name** — a function, variable, or type whose name doesn't reveal what it does or holds. → rename it; if no honest name comes, the design's murky.
+- **Duplicated Code** — the same logic shape appears in more than one hunk or file in the change. → extract the shared shape, call it from both.
+- **Feature Envy** — a method that reaches into another object's data more than its own. → move the method onto the data it envies.
+- **Data Clumps** — the same few fields or params keep travelling together (a type wanting to be born). → bundle them into one type, pass that.
+- **Primitive Obsession** — a primitive or string standing in for a domain concept that deserves its own type. → give the concept its own small type.
+- **Repeated Switches** — the same `switch`/`if`-cascade on the same type recurs across the change. → replace with polymorphism, or one map both sites share.
+- **Shotgun Surgery** — one logical change forces scattered edits across many files in the diff. → gather what changes together into one module.
+- **Divergent Change** — one file or module is edited for several unrelated reasons. → split so each module changes for one reason.
+- **Speculative Generality** — abstraction, parameters, or hooks added for needs the spec doesn't have. → delete it; inline back until a real need shows.
+- **Message Chains** — long `a.b().c().d()` navigation the caller shouldn't depend on. → hide the walk behind one method on the first object.
+- **Middle Man** — a class or function that mostly just delegates onward. → cut it, call the real target direct.
+- **Refused Bequest** — a subclass or implementer that ignores or overrides most of what it inherits. → drop the inheritance, use composition.

 ### 4. Spawn both sub-agents in parallel

@@ -51,22 +62,22 @@ Send a single message with two `Agent` tool calls. Use the `general-purpose` sub
 **Standards sub-agent prompt** — include:

 - The full diff command and commit list.
- The list of standards-source files you found in step 3.
- The brief: "Read the standards docs. Then read the diff. Report — per file/hunk where relevant — every place the diff violates a documented standard. Cite the standard (file + the rule). Distinguish hard violations from judgement calls. Skip anything tooling enforces. Under 400 words."
+- The list of standards-source files you found in step 3, **plus the smell baseline from step 3** pasted in full — the sub-agent has no other access to it.
+- The brief: "Report — per file/hunk where relevant — (a) every place the diff violates a documented standard: cite the standard (file + the rule); and (b) any baseline smell you spot: name it and quote the hunk. Distinguish hard violations from judgement calls — documented-standard breaches can be hard, but baseline smells are always judgement calls, and a documented repo standard overrides the baseline. Skip anything tooling enforces. Under 400 words."

 **Spec sub-agent prompt** — include:

 - The diff command and commit list.
 - The path or fetched contents of the spec.
- The brief: "Read the spec. Then read the diff. Report: (a) requirements the spec asked for that are missing or partial; (b) behaviour in the diff that wasn't asked for (scope creep); (c) requirements that look implemented but where the implementation looks wrong. Quote the spec line for each finding. Under 400 words."
+- The brief: "Report: (a) requirements the spec asked for that are missing or partial; (b) behaviour in the diff that wasn't asked for (scope creep); (c) requirements that look implemented but where the implementation looks wrong. Quote the spec line for each finding. Under 400 words."

 If the spec is missing, skip the Spec sub-agent and note this in the final report.

 ### 5. Aggregate

-Present the two reports under `## Standards` and `## Spec` headings, verbatim or lightly cleaned. Do **not** merge or rerank findings — the two axes are deliberately separate so the user can see them independently.
+Present the two reports under `## Standards` and `## Spec` headings, verbatim or lightly cleaned. Do **not** merge or rerank findings — the two axes are deliberately separate (see _Why two axes_).

-End with a one-line summary: total findings per axis, and the worst single issue (if any) flagged.
+End with a one-line summary: total findings per axis, and the worst issue _within each axis_ (if any). Don't pick a single winner across axes — that's the reranking the separation exists to prevent.

 ## Why two axes

@@ -0,0 +1,45 @@
+---
+name: wizard
+description: Generate an interactive bash wizard that walks a human through a manual procedure — third-party setup, a one-off migration, an A→B state transition — opening URLs, capturing values, confirming each step, and writing .env files and GitHub Actions secrets.
+disable-model-invocation: true
+---
+
+# Wizard
+
+A **wizard** is a bash script that walks a human, step by step, through a manual procedure that's tedious to do by hand and tedious to re-explain to an AI every time. It opens each URL, says exactly what to click and copy, captures the values, writes them where they belong (`.env`, GitHub secrets), confirms at every stage, and shows how much is left. It might configure third-party services, run a one-off migration, or move the project from one state to another.
+
+The delightful UX is already solved by [template.sh](template.sh) — progress with time-remaining, confirmation gates, cross-platform URL opening (including WSL), hidden secret entry, idempotent `.env` upserts, `gh secret`/`gh variable` writes, and a closing summary. **Your job is only to scope the procedure and author its stages.** The library above the `STAGES` marker is identical in every wizard; that consistency is the point — never hand-edit it.
+
+A wizard is ephemeral by default — built for one run, saved to a scratch or `scripts/` path, deleted when the job's done. Commit it only when the user wants a repeatable setup path that should live in the repo.
+
+## Process
+
+### 1. Scope the procedure
+
+Work out every manual step the human must take and every value that gets captured along the way. Read the repo first — don't ask cold:
+
+- For setup: `.env`, `.env.example`, `.env.*`, `README`, `docker-compose*`, framework config, and `.github/workflows/*` (every `secrets.*` / `vars.*` reference is a value the wizard must produce).
+- For a migration or transition: the current state, the target state, and the irreversible actions between them.
+
+Then show the user the ordered list of stages and the values each produces, and confirm — they may add, drop, or reorder.
+
+**Done when:** every stage is named in order, and for each captured value you know (a) where the human gets it, (b) where it's written (`.env`, a GitHub secret, both, or nowhere — some stages are pure actions), and (c) whether it's secret (hidden entry) or public.
+
+### 2. Map each stage's journey
+
+For each stage, write the precise path a human follows: which URL to open, what to do there, where a value is shown, which variable it fills — e.g. "Dashboard → Developers → API keys → Reveal test key → copy". Where you don't actually know the current UI or the exact command, say so and ask the user or check the docs — never invent steps that may not exist.
+
+**Done when:** every stage traces to concrete instructions a stranger could follow.
+
+### 3. Author the wizard
+
+Copy `template.sh` to the target path. Replace the example stage with one `stage` per step, in dependency order. Use the library helpers — `stage`, `say`/`step`, `open_url`, `ask`/`ask_secret`, `write_env`, `set_secret`/`set_var`, `pause`/`confirm` — and set `TOTAL_STAGES` and `TOTAL_MINUTES` to honest estimates (this drives the time-remaining display).
+
+Hold the bar the template sets: open the URL before asking for its value, use `ask_secret` for anything secret, `write_env` every persisted value, `set_secret` only the values CI actually needs, and `confirm` before any irreversible action. Each `stage` clears the screen so only the current step is visible — keep a stage to one focused task so nothing the human needs scrolls away. Don't touch the library above the marker.
+
+### 4. Verify and hand off
+
+- `bash -n <script>`; run `shellcheck` if available.
+- `chmod +x <script>`.
+- Don't run it end-to-end yourself — it opens browsers and blocks on human input. Trace it statically instead: every value from step 1 is captured and lands where step 1 said, and every `set_secret` name exactly matches a `secrets.*` reference in CI.
+- Tell the user how to run it. If it's a repeatable setup path, commit it and link it from the README so the next person runs the script instead of asking an AI.
@@ -0,0 +1,211 @@
+#!/usr/bin/env bash
+#
+# A wizard — walks a human through a manual procedure step by step.
+# Generated by the /wizard skill.
+#
+# Everything above the "STAGES" marker is the wizard library: do not hand-edit
+# it. Author the per-step stages below the marker.
+
+set -euo pipefail
+
+# ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+# Wizard library — delightful, consistent UX. Identical across every wizard.
+# ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+
+if [[ -t 1 ]] && command -v tput >/dev/null 2>&1 && [[ "$(tput colors 2>/dev/null || echo 0)" -ge 8 ]]; then
+  BOLD=$(tput bold); DIM=$(tput dim); RESET=$(tput sgr0)
+  BLUE=$(tput setaf 4); GREEN=$(tput setaf 2); YELLOW=$(tput setaf 3); RED=$(tput setaf 1)
+else
+  BOLD=""; DIM=""; RESET=""; BLUE=""; GREEN=""; YELLOW=""; RED=""
+fi
+
+# Author sets these two at the top of the stages section.
+TOTAL_STAGES=0
+TOTAL_MINUTES=0
+
+_STAGE_INDEX=0
+_MINUTES_ELAPSED=0
+ENV_FILE="${ENV_FILE:-.env}"
+WRITTEN_ENV=()    # KEYs written to ENV_FILE this run
+WRITTEN_SECRET=() # secret NAMEs set this run
+SKIPPED=()        # things we couldn't do (e.g. gh missing)
+
+# _clear — wipe the terminal so only the current step is on screen. No-op when
+# output isn't a terminal, so piped logs stay readable.
+_clear() {
+  [[ -t 1 ]] || return 0
+  if command -v tput >/dev/null 2>&1; then tput clear; else printf '\033[2J\033[3J\033[H'; fi
+}
+
+# banner "Title" — opening frame: what this wizard does and how long it takes.
+banner() {
+  _clear
+  printf '\n%s%s  %s%s\n' "$BOLD" "$BLUE" "$1" "$RESET"
+  printf '%s  %s stages · about %s minutes%s\n\n' \
+    "$DIM" "$TOTAL_STAGES" "$TOTAL_MINUTES" "$RESET"
+  printf '%s  You drive the browser; this wizard tells you exactly what to do and\n' "$DIM"
+  printf '  captures the values you copy back. Stop any time with Ctrl-C and re-run\n'
+  printf '  later — it remembers values already saved.%s\n' "$RESET"
+  pause "Ready to start?"
+}
+
+# stage "Name" <minutes> — clear the screen, then announce a stage and show
+# progress + time remaining. Clearing keeps only the current step on screen.
+stage() {
+  _clear
+  _STAGE_INDEX=$((_STAGE_INDEX + 1))
+  local remaining=$((TOTAL_MINUTES - _MINUTES_ELAPSED))
+  (( remaining < 0 )) && remaining=0
+  _MINUTES_ELAPSED=$((_MINUTES_ELAPSED + ${2:-0}))
+  printf '\n%s%s▸ Stage %s/%s · %s%s  %s(~%s min left)%s\n' \
+    "$BOLD" "$BLUE" "$_STAGE_INDEX" "$TOTAL_STAGES" "$1" "$RESET" "$DIM" "$remaining" "$RESET"
+}
+
+# say "..." — a plain instruction line.
+say()  { printf '  %s\n' "$1"; }
+# step "..." — a numbered-feeling action the human takes in the browser.
+step() { printf '  %s•%s %s\n' "$BLUE" "$RESET" "$1"; }
+note() { printf '  %s%s%s\n' "$DIM" "$1" "$RESET"; }
+warn() { printf '  %s⚠ %s%s\n' "$YELLOW" "$1" "$RESET"; }
+
+# open_url URL — open in the human's browser, cross-platform incl. WSL.
+open_url() {
+  local url="$1"
+  printf '  %s↗ opening%s %s\n' "$GREEN" "$RESET" "$url"
+  { if   command -v wslview     >/dev/null 2>&1; then wslview "$url"
+    elif command -v explorer.exe >/dev/null 2>&1; then explorer.exe "$url"
+    elif command -v xdg-open    >/dev/null 2>&1; then xdg-open "$url"
+    elif command -v open        >/dev/null 2>&1; then open "$url"
+    else warn "couldn't open a browser — visit it manually: $url"; fi
+  } >/dev/null 2>&1 || warn "couldn't open a browser — visit it manually: $url"
+}
+
+# pause "msg" — wait for the human to confirm they've done the manual part.
+pause() {
+  printf '  %s%s%s ' "$DIM" "${1:-Press Enter to continue}" "$RESET"
+  read -r _ || true
+}
+
+# confirm "question" — y/N gate; returns success on yes.
+confirm() {
+  local reply=""
+  printf '  %s? %s [y/N] ' "$YELLOW" "$1"
+  read -r reply || true
+  [[ "$reply" =~ ^[Yy] ]]
+}
+
+# _existing KEY — current value of KEY in ENV_FILE, if any.
+_existing() {
+  [[ -f "$ENV_FILE" ]] || return 1
+  local line; line=$(grep -E "^${1}=" "$ENV_FILE" | tail -n1) || return 1
+  printf '%s' "${line#*=}"
+}
+
+# ask KEY "Prompt" — read a value into $KEY. Offers the existing .env value as
+# a default on re-runs (Enter keeps it). Visible input (non-secret).
+ask() {
+  local key="$1" prompt="$2" current input
+  current=$(_existing "$key" || true)
+  if [[ -n "$current" ]]; then
+    printf '  %s%s%s %s[Enter keeps current]%s ' "$BOLD" "$prompt" "$RESET" "$DIM" "$RESET"
+  else
+    printf '  %s%s%s ' "$BOLD" "$prompt" "$RESET"
+  fi
+  read -r input || true
+  [[ -z "$input" && -n "$current" ]] && input="$current"
+  printf -v "$key" '%s' "$input"
+}
+
+# ask_secret KEY "Prompt" — like ask, but input is hidden.
+ask_secret() {
+  local key="$1" prompt="$2" current input
+  current=$(_existing "$key" || true)
+  if [[ -n "$current" ]]; then
+    printf '  %s%s%s %s[Enter keeps current]%s ' "$BOLD" "$prompt" "$RESET" "$DIM" "$RESET"
+  else
+    printf '  %s%s%s ' "$BOLD" "$prompt" "$RESET"
+  fi
+  read -rs input || true
+  printf '\n'
+  [[ -z "$input" && -n "$current" ]] && input="$current"
+  printf -v "$key" '%s' "$input"
+}
+
+# write_env KEY VALUE — upsert KEY=VALUE into ENV_FILE (creates it; replaces
+# any existing line). Idempotent.
+write_env() {
+  local key="$1" value="$2" tmp
+  touch "$ENV_FILE"
+  tmp=$(mktemp)
+  grep -vE "^${key}=" "$ENV_FILE" > "$tmp" || true
+  printf '%s=%s\n' "$key" "$value" >> "$tmp"
+  mv "$tmp" "$ENV_FILE"
+  WRITTEN_ENV+=("$key")
+  printf '  %s✓ wrote%s %s → %s\n' "$GREEN" "$RESET" "$key" "$ENV_FILE"
+}
+
+# set_secret NAME VALUE — set a GitHub Actions repo secret via gh. Falls back
+# to a warning (and records it) if gh is unavailable or unauthenticated.
+set_secret() {
+  local name="$1" value="$2"
+  if command -v gh >/dev/null 2>&1 && gh auth status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+    if printf '%s' "$value" | gh secret set "$name" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+      WRITTEN_SECRET+=("$name")
+      printf '  %s✓ set%s GitHub secret %s\n' "$GREEN" "$RESET" "$name"
+      return
+    fi
+  fi
+  SKIPPED+=("GitHub secret $name (set it manually: gh secret set $name)")
+  warn "skipped GitHub secret $name — gh not ready; set it later"
+}
+
+# set_var NAME VALUE — set a GitHub Actions repo variable (non-secret).
+set_var() {
+  local name="$1" value="$2"
+  if command -v gh >/dev/null 2>&1 && gh auth status >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+    if gh variable set "$name" --body "$value" >/dev/null 2>&1; then
+      printf '  %s✓ set%s GitHub variable %s\n' "$GREEN" "$RESET" "$name"
+      return
+    fi
+  fi
+  SKIPPED+=("GitHub variable $name")
+  warn "skipped GitHub variable $name — gh not ready; set it later"
+}
+
+# finish — clear, then a closing summary of everything configured.
+finish() {
+  _clear
+  printf '\n%s%s  ✓ Setup complete%s\n' "$BOLD" "$GREEN" "$RESET"
+  (( ${#WRITTEN_ENV[@]} ))    && note "wrote ${#WRITTEN_ENV[@]} value(s) to $ENV_FILE: ${WRITTEN_ENV[*]}"
+  (( ${#WRITTEN_SECRET[@]} )) && note "set ${#WRITTEN_SECRET[@]} GitHub secret(s): ${WRITTEN_SECRET[*]}"
+  if (( ${#SKIPPED[@]} )); then
+    printf '\n'; warn "still to do by hand:"
+    for s in "${SKIPPED[@]}"; do note "  - $s"; done
+  fi
+  printf '\n'
+}
+
+# ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+# STAGES — author this section. One stage() per step the human takes.
+# Replace the example below. Set the two totals to match the stages you write.
+# ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+
+TOTAL_STAGES=1
+TOTAL_MINUTES=5
+
+banner "Stripe setup"
+
+# ── Example stage: replace with your real steps ───────────────────────────
+stage "Stripe — API keys" 5
+say "We'll grab your Stripe test keys and store them for local dev + CI."
+open_url "https://dashboard.stripe.com/test/apikeys"
+step "On the API keys page, copy the Publishable key (starts pk_test_)."
+ask STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY "Paste the publishable key:"
+step "Click 'Reveal test key' on the Secret key row, then copy it."
+ask_secret STRIPE_SECRET_KEY "Paste the secret key:"
+write_env STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY "$STRIPE_PUBLISHABLE_KEY"
+write_env STRIPE_SECRET_KEY "$STRIPE_SECRET_KEY"
+set_secret STRIPE_SECRET_KEY "$STRIPE_SECRET_KEY"   # CI needs this one
+# ──────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────────
+
+finish
@@ -1,25 +1,42 @@
 ---
 name: writing-beats
-description: Shape an article as a journey of beats, choose-your-own-adventure style. The user picks a starting beat from the raw material, you write only that beat, then offer options for where to pivot next, beat by beat, until the article reaches a natural end. Use when the user has raw material and wants to assemble it as a narrative rather than an argument.
+description: Writing, exploit — assemble raw material into a journey of beats, grounding each term before a beat leans on it.
+disable-model-invocation: true
 ---

 <what-to-do>

-The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material.
+The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material. This is **exploit**: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed — commit to a path through it and mine the pile to fill each beat.

 If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.

-Then run a beat-by-beat journey:
+Then run a beat-by-beat journey, choose-your-own-adventure style:

-1. Write 2–3 candidate **starting beats**, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Show the user the beats before writing it to the article file. The user picks one. Preview what beats that might lead to once written - as if the user is seeing a little way down the path.
-2. Once the user picks a starting beat, write **only that beat** to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there.
-3. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate **next beats** — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands.
-4. Loop steps 2–4 until the article reaches a natural end.
+1. **Establish the prerequisites.** Before any beats, settle with the user what the audience already knows walking in — the concepts that are **grounded** from the start. Everything else must be grounded by a beat before a later beat can use it. See [Grounding](#grounding).
+2. Write 2–3 candidate **starting beats**, drawn from the raw material. Each is a different entry point into the article. Each may only lean on grounded concepts; note what new concepts each one grounds. Show the user the beats before writing to the article file. The user picks one. Preview what beats that pick unlocks — as if the user is seeing a little way down the path.
+3. Once the user picks a starting beat, write **only that beat** to the article file. A beat may be one sentence or several paragraphs — whatever that beat naturally is. Stop there.
+4. Re-read the article file from disk. Then offer 2–3 candidate **next beats** — different directions the journey could pivot to from where the article now stands. Each must be reachable from the current grounded set; note what each one grounds.
+5. Loop steps 3–5 until the article reaches a natural end.

 </what-to-do>

 <supporting-info>

+## Grounding
+
+Every **concept** has to be **grounded** before a beat can lean on it: the audience either walked in knowing it or met it in an earlier beat. A beat that reaches for an ungrounded concept loses the reader — that is the one move the journey can't make. The unit is the concept, not the word for it: a beat can lean on an idea the reader lacks even with no jargon in sight. Where a concept has a name — a **term** — grounding it means landing the idea and the term together.
+
+A concept gets grounded one of two ways:
+
+- **Prerequisite** — grounded before the first beat. The audience brings it. Fixed at the start.
+- **Introduced** — a beat establishes it, and from then on it's grounded for every later beat.
+
+So each beat does two jobs: it **requires** concepts that are already grounded, and it **grounds** new ones. Keep a running list of what's grounded so far, and update it each time a beat lands.
+
+This is what shapes the choose-your-own-adventure. A candidate beat is only reachable if everything it requires is already grounded; picking a beat that grounds concept X unlocks every beat that was waiting on X. When you offer next beats, they must all be reachable from the current grounded set — and say what each one grounds, so the user can see which paths it opens.
+
+The big lever is what you make a prerequisite versus what you ground inside the piece. Demand too much up front and you shut out readers who don't have it; ground too much inside and the early beats drown in definitions. Settle this with the user when you establish prerequisites, and revisit it whenever a tempting beat turns out to require a concept nothing has grounded yet — the fix is either a grounding beat before it, or promoting the concept to a prerequisite.
+
 ## What is a beat

 A beat is one move in the journey. It does one thing — sets a scene, lands a point, asks a question, drops an aside, twists the angle. Then it stops, leaving the reader at a place where the next beat can pivot.
@@ -32,11 +49,9 @@ A beat is sized by what it needs:

 If a "beat" needs five paragraphs and three subheadings, it's not a beat — it's two beats glued together. Split it.

-## Writing one beat
+## Pulling from the pile

-Once a beat is picked, write _that beat only_ to the article file. Do not write the next beat.
-
-Pull material from the raw pile to populate the beat. You can paraphrase, split, recombine, or quote. The pile is a quarry.
+Pull material from the raw pile to populate each beat. You can paraphrase, split, recombine, or quote. The pile is a quarry.

 ## Ending the journey

@@ -1,13 +1,14 @@
 ---
 name: writing-fragments
-description: Grilling session that mines the user for fragments — heterogeneous nuggets of writing (claims, vignettes, sharp sentences, half-thoughts) — and appends them to a single document as raw material for a future article. Use when the user wants to develop ideas before imposing structure, or mentions "fragments", "ideate", or "raw material" for writing.
+description: Writing, explore — mine raw fragments, no structure yet.
+disable-model-invocation: true
 ---

 <what-to-do>

-Run a grilling session that produces fragments. Interview the user relentlessly about whatever they want to write about. Do not impose phases, outlines, or structure — that is explicitly out of scope.
+This is pure **explore**: widen the space of what could be written without committing to structure — committing is _exploit_, a separate skill's job. Run a grilling session that produces fragments, interviewing the user relentlessly about whatever they want to write about. Imposing phases, outlines, or article structure is out of scope here.

-As fragments emerge from either side of the conversation, append them to a single markdown file. The user will be editing this file during the session; always re-read it before writing so their edits are preserved.
+As fragments emerge from either side of the conversation, append them to a single markdown file.

 If the user did not pass a path, ask once where to save the document, then remember it for the rest of the session.

@@ -32,6 +33,9 @@ Fragments are deliberately heterogeneous. Examples of what could be a fragment:
 - A quote, a piece of dialogue, an overheard line.
 - A list of related observations that hang together by feel.
 - A complaint, a confession, a punchline.
+- A **leading word** — a compact metaphor or coinage the whole piece can hang on (one term that names the idea, the way _tracer bullets_ or _fog of war_ names a whole pattern).
+
+Of these, the leading word is the most valuable fragment to land. It is load-bearing: name the right one in explore and it shapes the structure, the transitions, and the title later — paying dividends through the entire exploit phase. When the conversation circles a recurring idea, push to coin a word for it.

 The novelist's diary is the model: years of unstructured noticings that later get mined for raw material. Fragments are noticings.

@@ -1,15 +1,16 @@
 ---
 name: writing-shape
-description: Take a markdown file of raw material and shape it into an article through a conversational session — drafting candidate openings, growing the piece paragraph by paragraph, arguing about format (lists, tables, callouts, quotes) at each step. Use when the user has a pile of notes, fragments, or a rough draft and wants help turning it into something publishable.
+description: Writing, exploit — shape raw material into an article, paragraph by paragraph.
+disable-model-invocation: true
 ---

 <what-to-do>

 The user has passed (or will pass) a markdown file of raw material. Treat it as the input pile — anything from a tidy list of fragments to a wall of unstructured prose to a transcript. The format does not matter. Read it end-to-end before doing anything else.

-Then run a shaping session that produces a separate article document. Do not edit the raw material file — it is read-only to this skill.
+Then run a shaping session that produces a separate article document. This is **exploit**: the exploring is done, the pile is fixed — commit to a structure and mine the pile to fill it. Do not edit the raw material file — it is read-only to this skill.

-If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path. The user will be editing the article file during the session; always re-read it before writing so their edits are preserved.
+If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the path.

 </what-to-do>

@@ -18,10 +19,24 @@ If the user did not say where to save the article, ask once and remember the pat
 ## The loop

 1. **Read the pile.** Read the input file in full. Form a sense of what's in it.
-2. **Draft 2–3 candidate openings.** Each opening should imply a different thesis or angle for the article. Show all of them. Force the user to pick or compose a hybrid. The chosen opening defines what the rest of the article must do.
-3. **Grow paragraph by paragraph.** After the opening lands, ask "given this opening, what does the reader need to hear next?" Pull material from the pile to answer. Argue about whether the next beat is a paragraph, a list, a table, a callout, a quote, a code block. Each format choice should be deliberate and defensible.
-4. **Append to the article file as you go.** Don't batch. Write each agreed paragraph or block immediately so the user can see the article taking shape.
-5. **Loop step 3 until the article is done.** The user decides when it's done.
+2. **Establish the prerequisites.** Settle with the user what the reader knows walking in — the concepts that are **grounded** from the start. Everything else must be grounded by a block before a later block can lean on it. See [Grounding](#grounding).
+3. **Draft 2–3 candidate openings.** Each opening should imply a different thesis or angle for the article. Show all of them. Force the user to pick or compose a hybrid. The chosen opening defines what the rest of the article must do.
+4. **Grow paragraph by paragraph.** After the opening lands, ask "given this opening, what does the reader need to hear next?" Pull material from the pile to answer. The next block may only lean on grounded concepts, and grounds new ones as it lands. Argue about the form the next block takes — a paragraph, a list, a table, a callout, a quote, a code block. Each format choice should be deliberate and defensible.
+5. **Append to the article file as you go.** Don't batch. Write each agreed paragraph or block immediately so the user can see the article taking shape.
+6. **Loop step 4 until the article is done.** The user decides when it's done.
+
+## Grounding
+
+Every **concept** has to be **grounded** before a block can lean on it: the reader either walked in knowing it or met it in an earlier block. A block that reaches for an ungrounded concept loses the reader. The unit is the concept, not the word for it — a block can lean on an idea the reader lacks even with no jargon in sight. Where a concept has a name — a **term** — grounding it means landing the idea and the term together.
+
+A concept gets grounded one of two ways:
+
+- **Prerequisite** — grounded before the opening. The reader brings it. Fixed at the start.
+- **Introduced** — a block establishes it, and from then on it's grounded for the rest of the article.
+
+Keep a running list of what's grounded. When you ask "what does the reader need to hear next?", an ungrounded concept the next move needs is itself the answer: ground it first — here or in an earlier block — or you can't make the move. This is the gap-naming of [Pulling from the pile](#pulling-from-the-pile) one level up: there the pile is missing material; here the article is missing a foundation.
+
+The lever is what you make a prerequisite versus what you ground inside the article. Demand too much up front and you shut readers out; ground too much inside and the opening drowns in definitions. Settle it with the user when you establish prerequisites.

 ## Conversational feel

@@ -43,7 +58,7 @@ If the pile lacks something the article needs, name the gap explicitly: "We need

 ## Format arguments to actually have

-When choosing how to render a beat, weigh these tradeoffs out loud with the user, not silently:
+When choosing how to render a block, weigh these tradeoffs out loud with the user, not silently:

 - **Prose vs. list.** Prose carries argument; lists carry parallel items. If items aren't truly parallel, prose is better. If they are, a list is faster to scan.
 - **Inline vs. callout.** Tips, warnings, and asides go in callouts (`> [!TIP]`, `> [!NOTE]`) — but only if they'd genuinely derail the main argument inline. Otherwise leave them inline.
@@ -57,7 +72,7 @@ Append to the article file as each block is agreed. Re-read the file from disk b

 ## Out of scope

- Mining for new fragments that aren't in the pile (the pile is the input — if it's incomplete, name the gap and either get the user to fill it or cut the section).
+- Mining for new fragments that aren't in the pile (handle gaps as in "Pulling from the pile").
 - Editing the raw material file.
 - Publishing, formatting for a specific platform, or adding frontmatter the user didn't ask for.

@@ -2,17 +2,17 @@

 General workflow tools, not code-specific.

-## Commands
+## User-invoked

-User-invoked entry points (`disable-model-invocation: true`).
+Reachable only when you type them (`disable-model-invocation: true`).

 - **[grill-me](./grill-me/SKILL.md)** — Get relentlessly interviewed about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved.
 - **[handoff](./handoff/SKILL.md)** — Compact the current conversation into a handoff document so another agent can continue the work.
 - **[teach](./teach/SKILL.md)** — Teach the user a new skill or concept over multiple sessions, using the current directory as a stateful teaching workspace.
- **[write-a-skill](./write-a-skill/SKILL.md)** — Create new skills with proper structure, progressive disclosure, and bundled resources.
+- **[writing-great-skills](./writing-great-skills/SKILL.md)** — Reference for writing and editing skills well: the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable.

-## Skills
+## Model-invoked

-Model- or user-invocable (rich trigger phrasing so the model can reach for them).
+Model- or user-reachable (rich trigger phrasing so the model can reach for them).

 - **[grilling](./grilling/SKILL.md)** — Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design until every branch of the decision tree is resolved.
@@ -5,6 +5,6 @@ description: Interview the user relentlessly about a plan or design. Use when th

 Interview me relentlessly about every aspect of this plan until we reach a shared understanding. Walk down each branch of the design tree, resolving dependencies between decisions one-by-one. For each question, provide your recommended answer.

-Ask the questions one at a time, waiting for feedback on each question before continuing.
+Ask the questions one at a time, waiting for feedback on each question before continuing. Asking multiple questions at once is bewildering.

 If a question can be answered by exploring the codebase, explore the codebase instead.
@@ -16,6 +16,7 @@ Treat the current directory as a teaching workspace. The state of their learning
 - `RESOURCES.md`: A list of resources which can be explored to ground your teaching in contextual knowledge, or to acquire knowledge and wisdom. Use the format in [RESOURCES-FORMAT.md](./RESOURCES-FORMAT.md).
 - `./learning-records/*.md`: A directory of learning records, which capture what the user has learned. These are loosely equivalent to architectural decision records in software development - they capture non-obvious lessons and key insights that may need to be revised later, or drive future sessions. These should be used to calculate the zone of proximal development. They are titled `0001-<dash-case-name>.md`, where the number increments each time. Use the format in [LEARNING-RECORD-FORMAT.md](./LEARNING-RECORD-FORMAT.md).
 - `./lessons/*.html`: A directory of lessons. A **lesson** is a single, self-contained HTML output that teaches one tightly-scoped thing tied to the mission. This is the primary unit of teaching in this workspace.
+- `./assets/*`: Reusable **components** shared across lessons. See [Assets](#assets).
 - `NOTES.md`: A scratchpad for you to jot down user preferences, or working notes.

 ## Philosophy
@@ -59,6 +60,14 @@ Each lesson should recommend a primary source for the user to read or watch. Thi

 Each lesson should contain a reminder to ask followup questions to the agent. The agent is their teacher, and can assist with anything that's unclear.

+## Assets
+
+Lessons are built from reusable **components**, stored in `./assets/`: stylesheets, quiz widgets, simulators, diagram helpers — anything a second lesson could reuse.
+
+Reuse is the default, not the exception. Before authoring a lesson, read `./assets/` and build from the components already there. When a lesson needs something new and reusable, write it as a component in `./assets/` and link to it — never inline code a future lesson would duplicate.
+
+A shared stylesheet is the first component every workspace earns: every lesson links it, so the lessons look like one consistent course rather than a pile of one-offs. As the workspace grows, so should the component library.
+
 ## The Mission

 Every lesson should be tied into the mission - the reason that the user is interested in learning about the topic.
@@ -1,118 +0,0 @@
---
-name: write-a-skill
-description: Create a new agent skill with proper structure, progressive disclosure, and bundled resources.
-disable-model-invocation: true
---
-
-# Writing Skills
-
-## Process
-
-1. **Gather requirements** - ask user about:
-   - What task/domain does the skill cover?
-   - What specific use cases should it handle?
-   - Does it need executable scripts or just instructions?
-   - Any reference materials to include?
-
-2. **Draft the skill** - create:
-   - SKILL.md with concise instructions
-   - Additional reference files if content exceeds 500 lines
-   - Utility scripts if deterministic operations needed
-
-3. **Review with user** - present draft and ask:
-   - Does this cover your use cases?
-   - Anything missing or unclear?
-   - Should any section be more/less detailed?
-
-## Skill Structure
-
-```
-skill-name/
-├── SKILL.md           # Main instructions (required)
-├── REFERENCE.md       # Detailed docs (if needed)
-├── EXAMPLES.md        # Usage examples (if needed)
-└── scripts/           # Utility scripts (if needed)
-    └── helper.js
-```
-
-## SKILL.md Template
-
-```md
---
-name: skill-name
-description: Brief description of capability. Use when [specific triggers].
---
-
-# Skill Name
-
-## Quick start
-
-[Minimal working example]
-
-## Workflows
-
-[Step-by-step processes with checklists for complex tasks]
-
-## Advanced features
-
-[Link to separate files: See [REFERENCE.md](REFERENCE.md)]
-```
-
-## Description Requirements
-
-The description is **the only thing your agent sees** when deciding which skill to load. It's surfaced in the system prompt alongside all other installed skills. Your agent reads these descriptions and picks the relevant skill based on the user's request.
-
-**Goal**: Give your agent just enough info to know:
-
-1. What capability this skill provides
-2. When/why to trigger it (specific keywords, contexts, file types)
-
-**Format**:
-
- Max 1024 chars
- Write in third person
- First sentence: what it does
- Second sentence: "Use when [specific triggers]"
-
-**Good example**:
-
-```
-Extract text and tables from PDF files, fill forms, merge documents. Use when working with PDF files or when user mentions PDFs, forms, or document extraction.
-```
-
-**Bad example**:
-
-```
-Helps with documents.
-```
-
-The bad example gives your agent no way to distinguish this from other document skills.
-
-## When to Add Scripts
-
-Add utility scripts when:
-
- Operation is deterministic (validation, formatting)
- Same code would be generated repeatedly
- Errors need explicit handling
-
-Scripts save tokens and improve reliability vs generated code.
-
-## When to Split Files
-
-Split into separate files when:
-
- SKILL.md exceeds 100 lines
- Content has distinct domains (finance vs sales schemas)
- Advanced features are rarely needed
-
-## Review Checklist
-
-After drafting, verify:
-
- [ ] Description includes triggers ("Use when...")
- [ ] SKILL.md under 100 lines
- [ ] No time-sensitive info
- [ ] Consistent terminology
- [ ] Concrete examples included
- [ ] References one level deep
@@ -0,0 +1,195 @@
+# Glossary — Building Great Skills
+
+The domain model for what makes a skill great. A skill exists to wrangle determinism out of a stochastic system; the root virtue is **Predictability**, and every term below is a lever on it. This is the disclosed reference for [`writing-great-skills`](SKILL.md).
+
+The terms are grouped by axis: **Invocation** (how a skill is reached), **Information Hierarchy** (how its content is arranged), **Steering** (how the agent's runtime behaviour is shaped), and **Pruning** (how it is kept lean). Each **failure mode** lives beside the lever that cures it, tagged _failure mode_.
+
+**Bold terms** in any definition are themselves defined in this glossary; find them by their heading.
+
+## Predictability
+
+The degree to which a skill makes the agent behave the same _way_ on every run — the same process, not the same output (a brainstorming skill should _predictably_ diverge; its tokens vary, its behaviour doesn't). The root virtue every other term serves — cost and maintainability are symptoms of it, not rivals.
+
+_Avoid_: consistency, reliability, robustness, output-determinism
+
+## Invocation
+
+How a skill is reached — and the two loads you pay for the choice.
+
+### Model-Invoked
+
+A skill that keeps its **description** field, so the agent can see it and fire it autonomously — and the human can still type its name, so model-invocation always _includes_ user reach. There is no model-only state: a description only ever _adds_ agent discovery, never removes the human's. Pays a permanent **context load** on every turn in exchange for that discoverability. Reachable by other skills, because the description that makes it agent-discoverable makes it invocable. A model-invoked skill whose content is all **reference** is also one home for shared reference: another skill can invoke it, so reference needed by several skills lives in one place. Pick model-invocation only when the agent must reach the skill on its own; if it never fires except by hand, drop the description and pay no context load.
+
+_Avoid_: ability, tool, capability
+
+### User-Invoked
+
+A skill with its **description** stripped — invisible to the agent and reachable only by the human typing its name (user-_only_, where **model-invoked** is user-_and-agent_). Trades agent-discoverability for zero **context load**. Because it has no description, nothing but the human can reach it: no other skill can fire it.
+
+_Avoid_: procedure, workflow, command
+
+### Description
+
+The skill's machine-readable trigger, and the one **context pointer** a **model-invoked** skill is forced to keep loaded at all times. Its mere presence _is_ the invocation axis: keep it and the skill is model-invoked (and reachable by other skills); delete it and the skill is **user-invoked**, reachable only by the human. The source of a model-invoked skill's **context load**.
+
+_Avoid_: frontmatter, summary
+
+### Context Pointer
+
+A reference held in the agent's context that names some out-of-context material and encodes the condition for reaching it. The **description** is the top-level context pointer (context window → skill); pointers to disclosed files are the same object one level down. Its wording, not the target, decides _when_ the agent reaches — and _how reliably_. A must-have target behind a weakly worded pointer is a variance bug: fix the wording first, and inline the material only if sharpening fails.
+
+_Avoid_: link, reference, import
+
+### Context Load
+
+The cost a **model-invoked** skill imposes on the agent's context window — its **description**, always loaded, spending both tokens and attention. What **user-invoked** skills escape by having no description, and the brake on splitting into more model-invoked skills.
+
+_Avoid_: token cost, context bloat
+
+### Cognitive Load
+
+The cost a **user-invoked** skill imposes on the human — what they must hold in their head: which skills exist and when to reach for each (the human is the index). What **model-invocation** removes by being agent-discoverable, and the brake on splitting into more user-invoked skills. Not a cost to minimise: it is the price of human agency, the reason some skills stay user-invoked. Spend it where human judgement matters; remove it where it does not.
+
+_Avoid_: human index, burden, overhead
+
+### Router Skill
+
+A **user-invoked** skill whose job is to point at your other user-invoked skills — naming each and when to reach for it — so the human has one skill to remember instead of many. It can only hint, never fire them: user-invoked skills have no **description**, so nothing but the human can reach them. The cure for **cognitive load** when user-invoked skills multiply.
+
+_Avoid_: dispatcher, menu, registry, index, router procedure
+
+### Granularity
+
+How finely you divide skills. Finer division spends one of the two loads: more **model-invoked** skills spend **context load** (more descriptions crowding the window and competing for attention); more **user-invoked** skills spend **cognitive load** (more for the human to remember and reach for). Two cuts guide the division. By **invocation**, split off a model-invoked skill where you have a distinct **leading word** to trigger it — a trigger word you actually use in your prompts. By **sequence**, split a run of **steps** where a step's **post-completion steps** need hiding, since isolating it in its own context clears what follows. Beware the reverse: merging sequences exposes each step's post-completion steps to what follows, inviting premature completion.
+
+_Avoid_: chunking, modularity
+
+## Information Hierarchy
+
+How a skill's content is arranged, and how far down the ladder each piece sits.
+
+### Information Hierarchy
+
+A skill's content ranked by how immediately the agent needs it — a single ladder, produced by two cuts: in-file or behind a pointer, and step or reference. The rungs:
+
+- **Steps** — in-file, primary
+- **Reference**, in-file — secondary
+- **Reference**, disclosed — behind a **context pointer**
+
+A skill with no **steps** uses just the bottom two rungs — often a legitimately flat peer-set (e.g. every rule of a review on one rung), which is a fine arrangement, not a smell. The hierarchy is independent of invocation: a skill can be model- or user-invoked whether it is all steps, all reference, or both. When a skill has steps, in-file reference that should be disclosed buries them and turns attending to them into a coin-flip — a variance lever, not just a legibility one. Keep the top of the ladder legible; push down it whatever you can.
+
+_Avoid_: structure, organization, layout
+
+### Steps
+
+The ordered actions the agent performs — when a skill has them, the primary tier of its content, and the part that earns its place in SKILL.md. Not every skill has steps: a skill can be all steps (`tdd`), all **reference** (a review), or both, independent of invocation. Every step ends on a **completion criterion**, clear or vague.
+
+_Avoid_: workflow, instructions, choreography
+
+### Reference
+
+Material the agent refers to on demand — definitions, facts, parameters, examples, conditional instructions. When a skill has **steps** it is secondary to them; when a skill has none it is the entire content; or it lives outside any skill entirely — see **External Reference**. Reached via **context pointers**, and the prime candidate for **progressive disclosure**.
+
+_Avoid_: supporting material, docs, background
+
+### External Reference
+
+**Reference** that lives outside the skill system — a plain file, no **description**, no **steps**, not invocable — that any skill can point at. The home for shared reference that needn't fire on its own, and the only shared home two **user-invoked** skills can use, since neither has a description and so neither can fire the other.
+
+_Avoid_: doc, resource, knowledge base
+
+### Progressive Disclosure
+
+Moving **reference** down the ladder — out of SKILL.md and behind a **context pointer** — so the top stays legible. Not primarily a token optimisation; it is how the **information hierarchy** is protected. Licensed by **branching**: disclose what only some branches need, inline what every path needs, and if a pointer fires unreliably on must-have material, sharpen its wording, and pull it back inline only if that fails.
+
+_Avoid_: lazy loading, chunking
+
+### Co-location
+
+Keeping the material an agent needs at once in one place — a concept's definition, rules, and caveats under a single heading, not scattered across the file — so reading one part brings its neighbours with it. The within-file companion to the **Information Hierarchy**: the hierarchy ranks _how far down_ a piece sits; co-location decides _what sits beside it_ once there. There is no formula for the right format of a body of **reference**; the test is that a skill should read like documentation written for the agent, and grouped material reads that way where scattered material does not. Distinct from **Duplication**: that repeats one meaning in two places, where scattering fragments a single meaning across many.
+
+_Avoid_: grouping, clustering, cohesion
+
+### Sprawl
+
+_Failure mode._ A skill that is simply too long — too many lines in SKILL.md — independent of whether they are stale or repeated. Even an all-live, all-unique skill can sprawl. It costs readability (the agent wades through more before it can act, and attention thins across the excess), maintainability (every extra line is one more to keep **relevant**), and tokens. The cure is the **information hierarchy**: push **reference** down behind **context pointers**, and split by **branch** or sequence so each path carries only what it needs. Distinct from **sediment** (length from stale accumulation) and **duplication** (length from repeated meaning) — sprawl is length itself, whatever its cause.
+
+_Avoid_: bloat, length, size, verbosity
+
+## Steering
+
+The levers that shape the agent's runtime behaviour toward **Predictability**.
+
+### Branch
+
+A distinct way a skill can be invoked — a case the skill handles — so different runs take different paths through it. A skill with many steps may carry many branches; a linear one has none.
+
+_Avoid_: path, case, fork
+
+### Leading Word
+
+A compact concept — also called a _Leitwort_ — already living in the model's pretraining, that the agent thinks with while running the skill. It encodes a behavioural principle in the fewest possible tokens by invoking priors the model already holds (e.g. _lesson_, _proximal zone of development_, _fog of war_, _tracer bullets_). Repeated as a token, never as a sentence, it accumulates a distributed definition across the skill and anchors a whole region of behaviour. Coining your own works if you define it clearly, but a made-up word recruits no priors — you pay in definition tokens what a pretrained word gives free. Reach for an existing word first.
+
+A leading word serves **predictability** twice. In the body it anchors **execution** — the agent reaches for the same behaviour every time the concept appears, and inside flat reference it focuses attention on a class of thing to look for, recruiting the right checks each run. In the **description** it anchors **invocation** — and not only within the skill: when the same word lives in your prompts, your docs, and your codebase, the agent links that shared language to the skill and fires it more reliably. Word a description with the leading words you actually use when you want the skill.
+
+_Avoid_: keyword, term, motif
+
+### Completion Criterion
+
+The condition that tells the agent a unit of work is done — the target it judges against. Two properties make it a lever, not just a quality. Its **clarity** (can the agent tell done from not-done?) resists **premature completion** — a vague bound ("understanding reached") lets the agent declare done and slip to the next step; this axis needs _steps_ to bite, since premature completion is a between-steps failure. Its **demand** (how much it requires) sets **legwork** — "every modified model accounted for" forces thorough work where "produce a change list" does not — and this axis is _not_ step-bound: it can bind a body of flat reference too, which is how a skill with no steps still carries an exhaustiveness bar ("every rule applied"). The strongest criteria are both checkable and exhaustive.
+
+_Avoid_: done condition, exit condition, stopping rule
+
+### Legwork
+
+The work an agent does behind the scenes within a single step — reading files, exploring the codebase, making changes, digging up what it needs rather than offloading to the user. It lives below the step structure: never written as its own step, latent in the wording, controlled by the agent rather than the skill. The within-step counterpart to **post-completion steps**' across-step pull. Raised by a **leading word** (_comprehensive_, _thorough_) or a **completion criterion** that demands the work be exhaustive — including the demand axis applied to flat reference, which is what drives a skill of flat reference to cover all its rungs. Goes thin either when that demand is missing or when **premature completion** cuts the step short.
+
+_Avoid_: scope, effort, diligence, coverage
+
+### Post-Completion Steps
+
+The **steps** that follow the current step. Visible, they pull the agent forward into **premature completion** — the more it sees, the stronger the tug; the defence is to hide them by splitting the sequence of steps into two.
+
+_Avoid_: horizon, fog of war, lookahead
+
+### Premature Completion
+
+_Failure mode._ Ending the current step before it is genuinely done, because the agent's attention slips to being done rather than to the work. A between-steps failure: it needs **steps** to occur — a skill with no steps that quits early isn't premature completion but thin **legwork** under an unmet demand. A tug-of-war between two forces: visible **post-completion steps** (the pull forward) and the **completion criterion**'s clarity (the resistance — a sharp, checkable bar holds; a vague one gives way). Fuzziness is the necessary condition: a sharp bound resists the pull no matter how many later steps are visible, so a step that never rushes needs no defending. Two levers hold a step that does, but reach for them in order: **sharpen the bound first** — it is local and cheap. Only when the criterion is irreducibly fuzzy _and_ you actually observe the rush do you **hide the later steps** — and hiding only works across a real context boundary (a user-invoked hand-off or a subagent dispatch; an inline model-invoked call leaves the later steps in context and clears nothing). One cause of thin legwork, but distinct from it: legwork can be thin even when a step runs to full completion.
+
+_Avoid_: premature closure, the rush, rushing, shortcutting
+
+## Pruning
+
+Keeping a skill lean — each remedy paired with the failure it cures.
+
+### Single Source of Truth
+
+The desired state where each meaning lives in exactly one authoritative place, so a change to the skill's behaviour is a change in one place. **Duplication** is its violation.
+
+_Avoid_: home, canonical location
+
+### Duplication
+
+_Failure mode._ The same meaning given more than one **single source of truth**. It costs maintenance (change one place, you must change the others), costs tokens, and inflates prominence — repeating a meaning weights it on the ladder past its real rank. The accidental inverse of a **leading word**, which raises attention on purpose by repeating a token, never the meaning.
+
+_Avoid_: repetition, redundancy
+
+### Relevance
+
+Whether a line still bears on what the skill does — the lens for what to keep. A line loses relevance either by never bearing on the task (mere exposition, or a **branch** that should be disclosed) or by going stale: drifting out of date as the behaviour or world it describes changes. Shorter skills are easier to keep relevant, because each line is cheaper to check. Distinct from **no-op**: relevance asks whether a line bears on the task, not whether it changes behaviour.
+
+_Avoid_: load-bearing, staleness, freshness
+
+### Sediment
+
+_Failure mode._ Layers of old content that settle in a skill and are never cleared, because adding feels safe and removing feels risky — so stale and irrelevant lines accumulate and you must core down through them to find what is still live. The default fate of any skill without a pruning discipline; the slow erosion of **relevance**, as opposed to **duplication**'s repeated meaning.
+
+_Avoid_: accretion, bloat, cruft, rot
+
+### No-Op
+
+_Failure mode._ An instruction that changes nothing because the model already does it by default — you pay load to tell the agent what it would do anyway. The test: does a line change behaviour versus the default? A line can be perfectly **relevant** and still be a no-op. The same priors that make a **leading word** free make a no-op worthless.
+
+A leading word is a _technique_; No-Op is a _verdict_ on a line — and they cross. A leading word too weak to beat the default is a no-op (_be thorough_ when the agent is already thorough-ish), and the fix is a stronger word that passes the verdict (_relentless_), not a different technique. So the No-Op test — does it change behaviour versus the default? — is also how you grade whether a leading word is earning its repetitions. This is model-relative, not reader-relative: two people disagreeing over whether a line is a no-op disagree about the default, and settle it by running the skill, not by debate.
+
+_Avoid_: redundant instruction, restating the obvious, belaboring
@@ -0,0 +1,82 @@
+---
+name: writing-great-skills
+description: Reference for writing and editing skills well — the vocabulary and principles that make a skill predictable.
+disable-model-invocation: true
+---
+
+A skill exists to wrangle determinism out of a stochastic system. **Predictability** — the agent taking the same _process_ every run, not producing the same output — is the root virtue; every lever below serves it.
+
+**Bold terms** are defined in [`GLOSSARY.md`](GLOSSARY.md); look them up there for the full meaning.
+
+## Invocation
+
+Two choices, trading different costs:
+
+- A **model-invoked** skill keeps a **description**, so the agent can fire it autonomously _and_ other skills can reach it (you can still type its name too). It contributes to **context load** — the description sits in the window every turn. Mechanics: omit `disable-model-invocation`, and write a model-facing description with rich trigger phrasing ("Use when the user wants…, mentions…").
+- A **user-invoked** skill strips the description from the agent's reach: only you, typing its name, can invoke it — and no other skill can. Zero context load, but it spends **cognitive load**: _you_ are the index that must remember it exists. Mechanics: set `disable-model-invocation: true`; the `description` becomes human-facing — a one-line summary, trigger lists stripped.
+
+Pick model-invocation only when the agent must reach the skill on its own, or another skill must. If it only ever fires by hand, make it user-invoked and pay no context load.
+
+When user-invoked skills multiply past what you can remember, that piled-up cognitive load is cured by a **router skill**: one user-invoked skill that names the others and when to reach for each.
+
+## Writing the description
+
+A model-invoked **description** does two jobs — state what the skill is, and list the **branches** that should trigger it. Every word increases **context load**, so a description earns even harder pruning than the body:
+
+- **Front-load the skill's leading word** — the description is where it does its invocation work.
+- **One trigger per branch.** Synonyms that rename a single branch are **duplication** — "build features using TDD … asks for test-first development" is one branch written twice. Collapse them; keep only genuinely distinct branches.
+- **Cut identity that's already in the body.** Keep the description to triggers, plus any "when another skill needs…" reach clause.
+
+## Information hierarchy
+
+A skill is built from two content types — **steps** and **reference** — that mix freely: a skill can be all steps, all reference, or both. The core decision is which to use and where each sits on the **information hierarchy**, a ladder ranked by how immediately the agent needs the material:
+
+1. **In-skill step** — an ordered action in `SKILL.md`, the primary tier: what the agent does, in order. Each step ends on a **completion criterion**, the condition that tells the agent the work is done. Make it _checkable_ (can the agent tell done from not-done?) and, where it matters, _exhaustive_ ("every modified model accounted for", not "produce a change list") — a vague criterion invites **premature completion**.
+2. **In-skill reference** — a definition, rule, or fact in `SKILL.md`, consulted on demand. Often a legitimately flat peer-set (every rule of a review on one rung) — a fine arrangement, not a smell. _This skill is all reference._
+3. **External reference** — reference pushed out of `SKILL.md` into a separate file, reached by a **context pointer**, loaded only when the pointer fires. (Spans _disclosed_ reference — a sibling file like `GLOSSARY.md`, still part of the skill — through fully **external reference** that lives outside the skill system and any skill can point at.)
+
+A demanding completion criterion drives thorough **legwork** — the digging the agent does within the work — whether the skill has steps or not, since "every rule applied" binds flat reference just as "every step done" binds a sequence.
+
+Push too little down and the top bloats; push too much and you hide material the agent actually needs. That tension is the whole decision.
+
+**Progressive disclosure** is the move down the ladder — out of `SKILL.md` into a linked file — so the top stays legible. Mechanics: a linked `.md` file in the skill folder, named for what it holds (this skill discloses its full definitions to `GLOSSARY.md`). Some skills are used in more than one way, and each distinct way is a **branch** — different runs taking different paths through the skill. Branching is the cleanest disclosure test: inline what every branch needs, and push behind a pointer what only some branches reach. A **context pointer**'s _wording_, not its target, decides when and how reliably the agent reaches the material.
+
+Where the ladder decides _how far down_ a piece sits, **co-location** decides _what sits beside it_ once there: keep a concept's definition, rules, and caveats under one heading rather than scattered, so reading one part brings its neighbours with it.
+
+## When to split
+
+**Granularity** is how finely you divide skills, and each cut spends one of the two loads, so split only when the cut earns it. Two cuts:
+
+- **By invocation** — split off a **model-invoked** skill when you have a distinct **leading word** that should trigger it on its own, or another skill must reach it. You pay **context load** for the new always-loaded **description**, so that independent reach has to be worth it.
+- **By sequence** — split a run of **steps** when the steps still ahead (a step's **post-completion steps**) tempt the agent to rush the one in front of it (**premature completion**). Keeping them out of view encourages the agent to do more **legwork** on the current task.
+
+## Pruning
+
+Keep each meaning in a **single source of truth**: one authoritative place, so changing the behaviour is a one-place edit.
+
+Check every line for **relevance**: does it still bear on what the skill does?
+
+Then hunt **no-ops** sentence by sentence, not just line by line: run the no-op test on each sentence in isolation, and when one fails, delete the whole sentence rather than trim words from it. Be aggressive — most prose that fails should go, not be rewritten.
+
+## Leading words
+
+A **leading word** is a compact concept already living in the model's pretraining that the agent thinks with while running the skill (e.g. _lesson_, _fog of war_, _tracer bullets_). Repeated throughout the text (though not necessarily - a strong leading word might only be needed once), it accumulates a distributed definition and anchors a whole region of behaviour in the fewest tokens, by recruiting priors the model already holds.
+
+It serves predictability twice. In the body it anchors _execution_: the agent reaches for the same behaviour every time the word appears. In the description it anchors _invocation_: when the same word lives in your prompts, docs, and code, the agent links that shared language to the skill and fires it more reliably.
+
+Hunt for opportunities to refactor skills to use leading words. A triad spelled out at three sites (**duplication**), a description spending a sentence to gesture at one idea — each is a passage begging to **collapse** into a single token. Examples include:
+
+- "fast, deterministic, low-overhead" -> _tight_ — one quality restated across a phase — into a single pretrained word (a _tight_ loop).
+- "a loop you believe in" -> _red_ — converts a fuzzy gate into a binary observable state (the loop goes _red_ on the bug, or it doesn't).
+
+You win twice over: fewer tokens, _and_ a sharper hook for the agent to hang its thinking on. Assume every skill is carrying restatements that leading words retire — go find them.
+
+## Failure modes
+
+Use these to diagnose issues the user may be having with the skill.
+
+- **Premature completion** — ending a step before it's genuinely done, attention slipping to _being done_. Defence, in order: sharpen the completion criterion first (cheap, local); only if it is irreducibly fuzzy _and_ you observe the rush, hide the post-completion steps by splitting (the sequence cut).
+- **Duplication** — the same meaning in more than one place. Costs maintenance and tokens, and inflates a meaning's prominence on the ladder past its real rank.
+- **Sediment** — stale layers that settle because adding feels safe and removing feels risky. The default fate of any skill without a pruning discipline.
+- **Sprawl** — a skill simply too long, even when every line is live and unique. Hurts readability and maintainability and wastes tokens. The cure is the ladder: disclose **reference** behind pointers, and split by **branch** or sequence so each path carries only what it needs.
+- **No-op** — a line the model already obeys by default, so you pay load to say nothing. The test: does it change behaviour versus the default? A weak leading word (_be thorough_ when the agent is already thorough-ish) is a no-op; the fix is a stronger word (_relentless_), not a different technique.
Author	SHA1	Message	Date
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	340d01b145	docs: add "It's working if" convention; flesh out PRD section - Replace the inline "watch for the leading words" line with an optional `## It's working if` section — a short list of observable signals the skill is doing its job. Keeps observability from being hammered onto leading words specifically. - Build out to-prd's "What the PRD includes" with proper casing and a one-line explainer per section. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-07-01 11:05:35 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	77cc47773c	docs: rework the skill docs-page template Reframe docs pages around cognitive-load relief: most skills are user-invoked, so the human is the index that must remember when to reach for each one. Each page's job is to make one skill memorable and situate it in the system. Template changes (.agents/writing-docs.md): - Quickstart block: install + `npx skills update`, install-first - New `## When to reach for it` (invocation mode + trigger boundary) - New optional `## Prerequisites` (workspace/state, prior setup, tooling) - Free-form middle with one firm rule: surface the leading word (also an observability signal in the agent's output) - `## Where it fits`: role-based, absorbs "Pairs well with", links ask-matt - No H1; every cross-link absolute Nest docs under bucket folders (docs/<bucket>/<name>.md); the published URL stays skills-<name> regardless. Re-sync to-prd as the worked exemplar. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-07-01 11:00:54 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	64d9f3d49e	Add Task ticket type to decision-mapping skill Some blockers are neither a decision, a prototype, nor research — just literal manual work (moving data, signing up for a service, provisioning access) that must happen before discussion can move forward. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-07-01 10:41:51 +01:00
Matt Pocock	7c1d609ce2	Add documentation guidelines for skill pages and update CLAUDE.md references	2026-07-01 09:57:05 +01:00
Matt Pocock	72748b9519	Fix command syntax in `to-prd` installation instructions	2026-07-01 09:51:25 +01:00
Matt Pocock	94cac3a3c7	Fix links in the `to-prd` documentation for better accessibility	2026-07-01 09:50:21 +01:00
Matt Pocock	3525dcd9b2	Add documentation for the `to-prd` skill	2026-07-01 09:48:39 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	6e178c6826	Move docs/ into .agents/ Relocate this repo's ADRs and invocation.md from docs/ to .agents/, and update the CLAUDE.md reference. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-07-01 09:46:14 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	0877403d1e	Merge pull request #398 from mattpocock/generalize-decision-mapping Generalize decision-mapping beyond engineering	2026-06-30 18:45:31 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	575d14b806	Trim Notes block to its definition (cut no-op behavioral prose) Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 18:44:56 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	79a5c9cc55	Keep Prototype name; move Notes block to end of map - Revert Sketch back to Prototype to mesh with the /prototype skill and existing vocabulary, keeping the generalized function-first definition. - Move the `## Notes` block from the top of the map to the end. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 18:40:52 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	3dc6800550	Generalize decision-mapping beyond engineering Decouple the skill from engineering so it plans any domain (e.g. course content) without specializing toward it. Domain specifics live in the map, not the skill body. - Add an optional `## Notes` block to the map: declares the domain + skills to consult, plus freeform standing preferences. Loaded into every session, honored by every session, accrues as it emerges. - Rename the Prototype ticket type to Sketch and define it by function — raise the fidelity of the discussion with a cheap concrete artifact to react to (/prototype is one medium among outline/rough-take/stub). - Note that validation is the thread through all three types, not a type. - Resolve step now consults skills named in Notes. The session machinery (one ticket per session, claiming, parallelism, handoff) is unchanged — it follows from the AI agent's smart/dumb zones, not the domain. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 18:38:34 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	801dca6885	docs(CLAUDE.md): point to scripts/link-skills.sh for (re)linking skills Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 11:36:43 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	999745ead1	Merge pull request #395 from mattpocock/dev-only-link-skills-note docs(link-skills): mark as a dev-only script	2026-06-30 10:29:36 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	6b8c429bc6	docs(link-skills): mark as a dev-only script Add a header note clarifying that link-skills.sh is a dev-only script for maintainers, not a supported installer, and that modifications or requests for modification will not be approved. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 10:28:50 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	7936cd4b8b	Merge pull request #394 from mattpocock/review-smell-baseline feat(review): always-on Fowler smell baseline in the Standards axis	2026-06-30 10:24:14 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	7a4c7561d4	Add changeset for review smell baseline Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 10:19:49 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	0894b3300f	review: add a terse fix to each smell in the baseline Each smell now reads what-it-is → how-to-fix, telegraphic style — the fix is the actionable half a reviewer needs, kept to a clause. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 10:02:31 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	cac470445b	feat(review): add an always-on Fowler smell baseline to the Standards axis Folds Refactoring ch.3 "Bad Smells in Code" into the in-progress `review` skill. The skill stays two-axis: smells layer into the Standards axis as a fixed, always-on baseline alongside a repo's documented standards, rather than a third axis. Because the baseline is needed on every run it lives inline in SKILL.md. Each smell is one line — its name carries the definition (the names are strong leading words) plus a diff-specific cue. Curated to ~12 high-signal smells; vague ones (Comments, Loops) and tooling-caught ones (Long Parameter List) are deliberately dropped. Two rules bind the baseline: a documented repo standard always overrides it, and every smell is reported as a judgement call, never a hard violation. The Standards sub-agent prompt now carries the baseline and these rules. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-30 09:58:26 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	43ea0884b0	tdd: add tautological-test anti-pattern Tests whose assertion is recomputed the way the code computes it pass by construction and give zero confidence. Add it as a peer of the existing implementation-coupling anti-pattern: a Philosophy principle, a per-cycle checklist gate, and a BAD/GOOD example pair in tests.md. Includes a patch changeset. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-29 21:22:50 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	a116824938	decision-mapping: key tickets by dash-case slugs, not numeric ids Replace numeric ticket ids (#1, #2…) with short, token-efficient dash-case slugs (e.g. relational-db) that read as mini-titles. Update the Structure example, the next-ticket selection rule (lowest-numbered → first in document order), the optional-arg wording, and the Handoff copy-paste examples accordingly. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-29 16:50:46 +01:00
Matt Pocock	448d0adee7	Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/mattpocock/skills # Conflicts: # skills/in-progress/decision-mapping/SKILL.md	2026-06-29 13:53:15 +01:00
Matt Pocock	850873cd73	feat: implement model-invoked prototype skill and enhance wizard functionality	2026-06-29 13:51:38 +01:00
Matt Pocock	5d78bd0903	fix: correct spelling of 'domain-modeling' in decision-mapping documentation	2026-06-25 12:48:23 +01:00
Matt Pocock	78636f8e5c	Updated writing-* skills	2026-06-25 11:57:14 +01:00
Matt Pocock	8370e760d0	refactor: enhance glossary clarity and structure	2026-06-24 11:29:44 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	74f0450b9c	Link skills into ~/.agents/skills as well as ~/.claude/skills Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-24 11:27:21 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	c71fce0297	Refine decision-mapping bootstrap step Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-24 11:26:57 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	e95b1813c5	Move loop-me into in-progress Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-24 11:26:57 +01:00
Matt Pocock	42396a51d6	fix: update ticket type terminology from "Discuss" to "Grilling"	2026-06-22 13:15:30 +01:00
Matt Pocock	6eeb81b5fc	Merge branch 'main' of https://github.com/mattpocock/skills	2026-06-18 09:41:33 +01:00
Matt Pocock	e00eadb4bb	Added PR's as a triage surface	2026-06-18 09:41:30 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	2454c95dc3	Merge pull request #347 from mattpocock/changeset-release/main chore: version skills	2026-06-17 23:07:39 +01:00
github-actions[bot]	7d684becad	chore: version skills	2026-06-17 21:26:49 +00:00
Matt Pocock	aa024cb195	feat: enhance teach skill to prioritize reusable components from ./assets	2026-06-17 22:26:34 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	d20ee2684e	feat: let teach skill share code between lessons via ./assets Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 22:18:21 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	bddb833cba	fix: create GitHub releases on version bump Add `publish: npx changeset tag` to the release workflow and enable tagging for private packages in the changesets config, so merging a Version PR creates a git tag and GitHub release. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 15:46:32 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	00ff03cac2	Merge pull request #345 from mattpocock/changeset-release/main chore: version skills	2026-06-17 15:40:47 +01:00
github-actions[bot]	82e85064ea	chore: version skills	2026-06-17 14:39:42 +00:00
Matt Pocock	47bde84da0	feat: introduce new skills and refine existing ones - Add `ask-matt` skill for user-invoked routing. - Introduce `codebase-design` and `domain-modeling` skills, updating dependencies. - Remove unused `caveman` and `zoom-out` skills. - Rename `diagnose` skill to `diagnosing-bugs`. - Add `resolving-merge-conflicts` skill for handling git conflicts. - Tighten `review` skill with improved checks. - Update skill taxonomy to user-invoked and model-invoked. - Replace `write-a-skill` with `writing-great-skills` for better guidance.	2026-06-17 15:39:06 +01:00
Matt PocockandGitHub	6a62d72ab1	Merge pull request #291 from mattpocock/matt/commands-and-skills Split skills into model-invoked vs user-invoked	2026-06-17 15:21:40 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	a032401486	chore: set up changesets Add changesets for tracking and versioning skill changes: - package.json (private) + @changesets/cli and @changesets/changelog-github - .changeset/config.json using the GitHub release-style changelog - release workflow that opens a version PR on push to main (no npm publish) - initial changeset recording recent skill updates Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 15:21:20 +01:00
Matt Pocock	ee8bae4006	Reduced description lengths	2026-06-17 15:15:11 +01:00
Matt Pocock	460f19f240	refine: Simplify description in 'ask-matt' skill documentation	2026-06-17 14:57:25 +01:00
Matt Pocock	245e31bbbd	refine: Remove 'caveman' skill and update documentation accordingly	2026-06-17 14:56:08 +01:00
Matt Pocock	48f3d31fef	refine: Clarify multi-session build process and enhance triage guidance in 'ask-matt' skill documentation	2026-06-17 14:53:11 +01:00
Matt Pocock	df129fcfce	refine: Add 'ask-matt' skill and update documentation for user-invoked skills	2026-06-17 14:45:47 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	aa7ed40cbe	refine: Make writing-great-skills hunt no-ops at the sentence level Add a Pruning directive to run the no-op test sentence by sentence and delete whole failing sentences rather than trim words. References the existing no-op test as single source of truth — no restated definition. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 14:33:42 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	2e647324f9	refine: Tighten review skill — fail-fast ref check, single-sourced rules, no-op cuts - Validate the fixed point resolves and diff is non-empty before spawning sub-agents - Single-source the tooling-enforced and two-axis rationale (point to Why two axes) - Fix rerank contradiction: summarize worst issue per axis, not across axes - Drop dead "Read X, then read the diff" preambles from both briefs Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 14:29:34 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	e112a6b03c	Remove zoom-out skill and all references Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-17 14:19:52 +01:00
Matt Pocock	801a01cc7d	refine: Update terminology from Commands/Skills to User-invoked/Model-invoked and enhance documentation	2026-06-17 14:18:05 +01:00
Matt Pocock	bc4cf903ff	Added writing-great-skills skill	2026-06-17 13:45:28 +01:00
Matt PocockandClaude Opus 4.8	ab7196a158	feat: Add decision-mapping skill Adds a new engineering skill that turns loose ideas with many interdependent open decisions into a sequenced DAG of one-session investigation tickets, driving them to resolution one at a time. Sits at the front of the pipeline, before /to-prd. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>	2026-06-15 13:30:21 +01:00