mad skills

How I like code written, reviewed, and committed — written down so the bots I pair with can pick it up without me repeating myself.

These are Agent Skills. Each description front-loads the words that should trigger it — the things I actually say, like "retcon", "watch me", or "citation needed".

I keep this repo checked out at .agents/skills/ in a workspace and symlink .claude/skills and .opencode/skills to it, so Claude Code and opencode see the same set.

writing code

• no-ambient-authority — clocks, RNGs, fetch, and the filesystem come in as parameters.
• io-between-turns — sync I/O is a pointy instrument.
• silent-failures-are-evil — every failure path leaves a trace in the logs.
• lazy-tdd — works the first time? fine. Goofed? You owe a test.
• docs-files-api — exported API docs over file docs. Avoid chit-chat.

commits and PRs

• disclose-gen-ai — Generated-by: trailers, per the ASF generative tooling guidance.
• retcon — regroup a PR's net diff into clean per-package commits; the merge result doesn't change.
• yarn-lock-separate-commit — yarn.lock changes ship alone.

writing prose

• grice-maxims — say what's needed and no more, only what you can back up, in an order easy to follow.
• hypertext-links — link text says where the link goes; no bare URLs, no "click here".
• citation-needed — back a challenged claim with live links, quoted and dated.
• ibis-design — search a design space: issues, positions, and arguments.

at the terminal

• watchme — I record the session with script -f; read the typescript instead of asking me what happened.
• run-confined — run an untrusted installer in a throwaway systemd user unit that can't see ~/.ssh and friends.
• what-was-i-doing — where did this file come from? Correlate mtimes with git history across every repo.

adding one

Name the directory for the trigger, not the topic. Write the description for the matcher: what I'd say, what I'd be doing, and what it's not for. Cite the source; quote the key line; explain the rest.