Skills

Cut hedging, apologies and marketing from technical prose without flattening it.

Follow a tutorial exactly as written and report the first step where it stops working.

Pull the domain terms out of a codebase and define them once, so the docs stop inventing synonyms.

Write a changelog entry from a diff: the change, who it affects, and what they have to do about it.

Check a reference for undocumented parameters, stale examples, and return values nobody described.

Restructure a README so the first screen answers what it is, who it's for, and how to run it.

Bring a schema's table and column names onto one convention, and list the migrations that would get there.

Find writes that should be atomic and aren't — multi-step mutations with no transaction around them.

Given a table's schema and its hottest queries, propose the smallest set of indexes that serves them.

Trace an endpoint's queries and flag loops that issue one query per row, with the join or batch that replaces them.

Check a database migration for locks that block writes, missing backfills, and changes that can't be rolled back.

Read a slow Postgres query and its EXPLAIN ANALYZE output, then say which index would change the plan and why.

Assemble a timeline from logs, alerts and chat, then draft the blameless writeup around it.

List every environment variable a service reads, which are required, and which have silent defaults.

Write the rollback for a deploy before it ships — what to revert, in what order, and what can't be undone.

Shrink a container image: layer order, build caching, and what has no business in a runtime image.

Read a failing CI run and separate real failures from flakes, infrastructure and timeouts.

Write the characterisation tests that let a refactor start, before touching the code.

Find snapshot tests that assert nothing anyone reads, and say what to assert instead.

Find the shared state, real clock or ordering assumption behind an intermittent failure.

Read a module and its tests, then list the behaviours nothing covers — ranked by what breaking would cost.

Turn a git log into release notes grouped by what changed for users, not by commit order.

Rewrite validation messages so they say what went wrong and what to do, in the user's words rather than the validator's.

Write the text for an empty state: what's missing, why, and the one action that fills it. Use when a list, table or dashboard has no rows yet.

Find colours that are hardcoded rather than tokenised, and any pair whose contrast fails once the theme flips.

Find hardcoded pixel margins and paddings that sit off a design system's spacing scale, and suggest the nearest token.

Walk a component tree and report every interactive element with no visible keyboard focus state. Read-only; it lists offenders with file and line.

Check what happens when each call fails — swallowed errors, empty catches, and retries with no ceiling.

Review a component's props for boolean traps, prop drilling, and states that should be one union instead of four flags.

Replace `any` and unchecked casts with types that make the invalid states unrepresentable.