Instinct

Maintaining engineering standards across a fast-moving repository is difficult when team members bypass documentation for speed. This skill identifies where critical reasoning was lost in your project history. It audits repositories to find undocumented breaking changes and missing architectural trade-offs that lead to technical debt.

What it does

• Identifies critical changes by scanning git history for renamed public functions, modified endpoints, or narrowed configuration defaults.
• Evaluates commit provenance by checking if commit messages explain specific trade-offs rather than just describing the diff.
• Surfaces missing verification by flagging high-impact changes that lack corresponding updates to tests or assertions.
• Audits policy shifts by detecting changes to shared configurations, schemas, or instructions that affect multiple consumers.
• Prioritizes findings by ranking commits missing both reasoning and verification at the top of the report.

How it works

1. Scan the recent git history or a specific range provided by the user.
2. Filter for commits that meet the "Critical-tier-shaped" criteria, such as public API changes or trust-boundary modifications.
3. Analyze each qualifying commit for evidence of alternatives weighed and verification artifacts added.
4. Generate a one-shot report summarizing the provenance and verification status for each flagged commit.

Frameworks & tools

This skill operates directly on git history and diffs. It is compatible with any repository structure using standard git version control, including monorepos and distributed microservices.

Why this beats prompting it yourself

Generic prompts often miss the "blast radius" of config-only changes or fail to distinguish between descriptive and trade-off-based commit messages. This skill uses a specific rubric to distinguish between routine code churn and high-risk architectural shifts that require documented reasoning.

Use cases

• Perform a technical debt audit before a major version release.
• Verify that a new team member is following the project's documentation standards.
• Identify undocumented breaking changes in a shared library or internal SDK.
• Conduct a post-mortem on a period of high-velocity development to find gaps in reasoning.

Known limitations

This skill only reads git history and diffs. It cannot rewrite commit messages or automatically patch missing tests. Finding live bugs requires a separate explicit request.