| You are a distinguished fellow on this project who is retiring. Your final task: build a | |
| complete skill library under .claude/skills/ so that junior/mid-level engineers and | |
| smaller AI models (Sonnet-class) can carry this project forward without you — cheaper | |
| sessions must be able to debug, extend, validate, and eventually advance this project at | |
| the standard I hold today. Use multi-agent orchestration (workflows) for authoring and | |
| review; token cost is not a constraint, correctness is. | |
| ## Phase 1 — Discover before you write (no skill authoring yet) | |
| Investigate the repo like an incoming principal engineer: README/manifest/contributor | |
| docs, the build system, the test suite and how it's actually run, CI config, docs | |
| directories, git history (what changed, what got reverted, what stalled on dead | |
| branches), open TODO/FIXME hotspots, issue-shaped artifacts, generated-data or deploy | |
| conventions, and any project memory/notes available to you. Then ask me AT MOST five | |
| questions, only for what the repo cannot tell you — likely: (1) what is the hardest | |
| live problem right now, (2) what unwritten discipline rules exist (things you're not | |
| allowed to do that no doc states), (3) who is the audience for this library and what do | |
| they NOT know, (4) what past failures cost the most time, (5) what does "beyond state | |
| of the art" mean for this project. Fold my answers into everything below. | |
| ## Phase 2 — Author the library (parallel agents, one skill per agent) | |
| Instantiate this taxonomy, ADAPTED to what Phase 1 found — merge categories that are | |
| thin here, split ones that are deep, add domain categories I haven't imagined. Aim for | |
| 10–16 skills: | |
| CORE (every project has these): | |
| 1. <project>-change-control — how changes are classified, gated, reviewed here; the | |
| project's non-negotiables with the rationale and the historical incident behind each. | |
| 2. <project>-debugging-playbook — symptom→triage table for this project's failure modes; | |
| the traps that cost real time (each with its story); discriminating experiments. | |
| 3. <project>-failure-archaeology — the chronicle: every major investigation, dead end, | |
| rejected fix, and revert, as symptom → root cause → evidence → status, so no one | |
| re-fights a settled battle. Mine git history and docs hard for this. | |
| 4. <project>-architecture-contract — the system's load-bearing design decisions and WHY; | |
| the invariants that must hold; the open known-weak points, stated plainly. | |
| 5. <domain>-reference — the domain-theory knowledge pack a mid-level person lacks | |
| (the field's math/protocols/standards as they apply HERE, not a textbook). | |
| 6. <project>-config-and-flags — catalog of every configuration axis: options, defaults, | |
| which are production vs experimental, guards; how to add one (checklist); with | |
| re-verification commands since flags drift. | |
| 7. <project>-build-and-env — recreate the environment from scratch; known traps. | |
| 8. <project>-run-and-operate — running/deploying the thing: command anatomy, data or | |
| artifact conventions, what output lands where. | | | 9. <project>-diagnostics-and-tooling — how to MEASURE instead of eyeball: the project's | | | diagnostic tools with interpretation guides; ship actual scripts inside the skill's | | | scripts/ dir where they exist or where you can write them. | | | 10. <project>-validation-and-qa — what counts as evidence here; acceptance-threshold | | | discipline; the certified/golden inventory; how to add tests. | | | 11. <project>-docs-and-writing — maintaining the docs of record; templates; house style. | | | 12. <project>-external-positioning — papers/releases/ecosystem: what's novel vs known, | | | what must be proven before claiming, reproducibility standards. | | | ADVANCED (the layer that makes juniors dangerous, in the good way): | | | 13. <project>-<hardest-problem>-campaign — an EXECUTABLE, decision-gated campaign for | | | the hardest live problem from Phase 1: numbered phases, exact commands, EXPECTED | | | observations/numbers at every gate ("if you see X instead → branch to Y"), the | | | solution menu ranked with theory/derivation obligations for each, known wrong paths | | | explicitly fenced off, and a validation-and-promotion protocol that routes through | | | the project's change control — success must be measurable, never judged by eye. | | | 14. <project>-proof-and-analysis-toolkit — the first-principles analysis methods of this | | | domain (whatever "prove it, don't just install it" means here), each as a recipe | | | with a worked example from this repo's history. | | | 15. <project>-research-frontier — open problems where this project could advance the | | | state of the art: for each, why current SOTA fails, this project's specific asset, | | | the first three concrete steps IN THIS REPO, and a falsifiable "you have a result | | | when…" milestone. | | | 16. <project>-research-methodology — the discipline that turns a hunch into an | | | accepted result here: the evidence bar (one mechanism must explain ALL observations | | | including negatives, and survive assigned adversarial refutation), hypothesis- | | | predicts-numbers-before-running, the idea lifecycle from experiment flag to adopted | | | change or documented retirement, and where good ideas historically came from. | |
| AUTHORING RULES (bake into every agent's prompt): | |
| - Audience: zero-context mid-level engineer or Sonnet-class model. Imperative runbook | |
| voice; copy-pasteable commands; every jargon term defined once; tables and checklists; | |
| each skill says when NOT to use it and which sibling to use instead. | |
| - Format: .claude/skills/<name>/SKILL.md, YAML frontmatter with name and a | |
| trigger-rich description (exactly when a model should load it). | |
| - GROUND TRUTH ONLY: verify every command, flag, path, and claim against the repo | |
| before stating it. Wrong runbooks are worse than none. | |
| - Embed knowledge; don't reference private/user-specific paths as load-bearing sources. | |
| - Date-stamp volatile facts; end each skill with a "Provenance and maintenance" section | |
| containing one-line re-verification commands for anything that may drift. | |
| - No oversell: unproven things stay labeled open/candidate. Nothing may contradict the | |
| project's own manifest/rules, and no skill may route around its change-control. | |
| - Write ONLY inside .claude/skills/; the rest of the repo is read-only; no mutating | |
| git commands. | |
| ## Phase 3 — Review and fix (after ALL skills exist) | |
| Three parallel reviewers over the complete set, then one fixer: | |
| - FACTUAL: re-verify flags/paths/commands/citations against the repo; flag anything | |
| invented or stale (severity: would it send an engineer down a wrong path?). | |
| - DOCTRINE: contradictions with the project's rules or between skills; overstated | |
| claims; missing gating on anything that changes behavior. | |
| - USABILITY: trigger quality of descriptions, duplication (one home per fact, | |
| cross-references elsewhere), self-containedness, scannability. | |
| Fixer applies blocking+important fixes. Then give me: the skill inventory with one-line | |
| descriptions, what you verified by spot-check, and what remains uncertain. |