Quick HackMD decks for light talks such as Agoric's engineering show &
tell: a flashback arc (TADA, then how, then challenges), real artifacts
as eye candy, and emoji tags that add up to a retro slide.
In the Portland Pattern Repository form notify-me tried, with an example
skeleton under the h1. The forces come from drafting the Good Fences
deck: the TADA has to be on the talk's own thread; slides show
challenges, they don't pose questions; designed, built in dev, and
deployed must be told apart.
The emoji legend is from the Jun 25 deck; meanings for 🔔📈🪄 are
inferred, and 🧱 is new.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Notify at the end of any turn long enough that the operator has
probably looked away, asked or not. opencode-web notifies on every
reply, which is too much; silence let a long turn sit unseen. -t 0
keeps a notice up through a walk (tested on MATE: the default notice
expired; the -t 0 one stayed until closed).
An experiment in form: the body is a Portland Pattern Repository
pattern (context, problem, forces, therefore, resulting context),
after Alexander, rather than the usual rules-and-recipe skill.
The tension: forces give an agent reasons to handle cases the rules
don't anticipate, and make the trade-offs visible to whoever edits
the skill next; but the form runs longer, and every word is paid on
each load, with the actionable part buried under the preamble.
The resolution: an example notify-send right under the h1, the
forces cut to one line each, and the description left in matcher
form. The result is shorter than the rules-style draft (459 words vs.
562). Resulting context: if it reads well in practice, judgment-call
skills may adopt the form; recipe skills (retcon, yarn.lock) likely
gain little from it.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A civil name for the same skill; "stop blathering" stays a trigger
phrase in the description, which now leads with replies: they happen
every turn, so they never look like a task that calls for a skill.
The README gloss now covers all four maxims, not just brevity.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Lessons from IBISing a2030.md's "Good Fences Make Good Agents":
arguments got pinned to the wrong position, a ruling-out comment was
really a con, and several issues were already answered by the design
text. Numbering made terse replies ("2: ...") unambiguous, and one big
fenced block outgrew a screen.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
From the "be concise" section of ~/.codex/AGENTS.md (Grice's maxims),
citing Strunk's Elements of Style and Payne's Lively Art of Writing.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
A ": " inside a plain-scalar description is a parse error; use a
folded block scalar instead.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Name the skill for what triggers it. Cite Wikipedia on capability-based
security and ambient authority, and point newcomers to awesome-ocap.
Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
Reconstruct past activity from an artifact's mtime: day-in-repos.sh
lists one day's commits and reflog entries (pulls, checkouts, clones:
local events git log never shows) across every repo locate knows.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Untrusted installers (curl | bash, unvetted npx packages) run in a
transient systemd user unit: $HOME unreadable, only ~/.local writable.
The script is a copy of office-admin/tools/run-confined.sh; it aborts
rather than run unconfined when AppArmor blocks user namespaces.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Comments say what the code is and why in the reader's terms: no traces
of the design conversation, and nothing the code already says.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Refines the program-script exception: when the script prints its usage,
the manual is a HELP string constant under a one-line @file (JS has no
docstrings), not a comment copied into code or re-read from source.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
The exception: a script run directly (shebang or import.meta.main) puts
its purpose, usage synopsis, arguments, and outputs in @file. Readers
open a script to learn how to run it; its main has no call sites for
JSDoc to show at.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
What a declaration is or does goes in /** */ on it (IDEs show it at call
sites and on hover); `//` is for the why of a line inside a body. The
description gains the trigger: a `//` comment explaining a declaration.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Event-loop turns run to completion, so I/O on shared, remote, or slow
state belongs between turns (async); synchronous access is fine only for
state local, prompt, and private to the actor, such as a Durable
Object's SQLite. Sourced from Miller, Tribble & Shapiro, "Concurrency
Among Strangers" (TGC 2005), §5.2 and §6 footnote 5.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
The description repeated the body's procedure (which file, the losing
diagnosis, the exact winning? replies). Keep only trigger phrases and
artifact names, and add two missed triggers: reading a recording
without the magic words, and how to set one up.
Drop the link to ../lab-notebook-template.md and the mention of a
`watchme` specimen capture; neither exists in this repo.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Every failure path leaves a trace in the logs, and no failure is
invented without checking what the API actually returns. Prompted by
diigo-cache's password-manager save reporting "not saved" on success
(CredentialsContainer.store() resolves with undefined).
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Prune references to other kriscendobot/garden skills and roles
(fixer, weaver, judge's panel, boatman/ferry, journal entries,
references/endo-but-for-bots) and per-PR session lore. Replace the
garden's created/updated/author frontmatter with name + a
trigger-first description. Keep the two skills cross-linked, since
both now live here, and credit upstream with links pinned to the
source commits.
retcon: tag pre-retcon tip as a numbered step; verify with a single
empty `git diff pre-retcon HEAD`; drop `git -C project`.
yarn-lock-separate-commit: promote the rebase --skip recipe from
field notes to its own section.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Front-load the description with trigger words (Generated-by trailer,
AI disclosure, commit message, PR description, Co-authored-by) and
add a when-not clause. Lead the body with a worked example; add
rules for mixed commits and PR descriptions.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
Code that works the first time may ship untested; a discovered goof
owes a regression test. Cites Dan Connolly's MadMode entry of
18 Mar 2006 on test-driven debugging.
Generated-by: Claude Opus 5.5
dckcandClaude Opus 5.5