mikestangdevs/craft-skills

craft-skills

Skills for code you'll have to live with.

These are the skills I reach for to get craft out of an agent, not just more code. Most coding skills help you produce code faster. These help you produce code that the next person — including future-you, and the next agent — can actually understand, change, and trust.

AI can write working code all day. For me the bottleneck moved a while ago: the expensive problems now are code nobody understands, names that hide intent, files that only grow, failures that vanish silently, and "quick changes" that become rewrites. And right behind those, a second family: tests written to pass, invented constants, point fixes on systemic bugs, and "should work now" shipped as if it were evidence.

So there are two collections here. Craft is the legibility layer — it makes code the next person can understand, change, and trust. Rigor is the proof layer — it makes the claims about that code believable: every "done" backed by evidence, every number backed by a source, every fix checked against its siblings. The rigor skills weren't designed on a whiteboard; they were mined from hundreds of hours of my own agent sessions on a physics simulation product, where a fudged constant isn't a style problem — it's a wrong answer someone acts on. Each skill in both collections fixes one specific failure mode, does one thing, works with any model, and is small enough to read in two minutes. Hack on them, make them your own.

Quickstart

1. Install — via the Claude Code plugin marketplace:

   /plugin marketplace add mikestangdevs/craft-skills
   /plugin install craft-skills
   

   …or with the skills CLI (works across agents, not just Claude Code):

   npx skills@latest add mikestangdevs/craft-skills
   

2. (Optional but recommended) Run it once per repo:

   /setup-craft-skills
   

   It scaffolds a CONTEXT.md — your domain glossary, conventions, and "untouchables" — t