Skills

plan → build → review

Acolyte’s engineering discipline. Each skill encodes a workflow the agent can activate when the task calls for it. Bundled skills are project-agnostic and available in every workspace.

These are specialized for Acolyte from the tool-agnostic set at cniska/skills, which carries the same workflow for any agent.

Multiple skills can be active in one session. The agent can load one or more in a single call, and the active set is shown in the status line.

Skills

Phase	Skill	Description
Plan	plan	Design through dialogue, slice vertically, clarify through questions
Build	build	Vertical slices — implement, verify, commit, repeat
	tdd	Red-green-refactor, mock at boundaries
	debug	Stop the line, reproduce, fix root cause, guard with test
	design	Hard-to-misuse interfaces, contract first, validate at boundaries
	simplify	Reduce complexity, Chesterton’s Fence, preserve behavior
	git	Atomic commits, clean history, rewrite before pushing
	deprecation	Build replacement first, migrate consumers, remove completely
Review	review	Run all review dimensions, severity labels, fix-all policy
	correctness-review	Logic bugs, edge cases, broken contracts
	style-review	Local conventions, naming, control flow, readability
	architecture-review	Boundaries, indirection pressure, contract integrity
	test-review	Coverage gaps, edge cases, test quality
	security-review	Trust boundaries, execution safety, concrete attack paths only
	doc-review	Drift detection, terminology, outdated names
Meta	agents-md	Create or update AGENTS.md project rules

Principles

These show up across multiple skills and form the shared engineering philosophy.

Principle	In practice	Skills
Vertical slices	One complete path through the stack at a time	build, plan
Contract first	Schema before implementation	design, build
SRP	One responsibility per module, one change per commit	architecture-review, build, git
YAGNI	Don’t build for hypothetical requirements	architecture-review, design
Stop the line	Something breaks — stop, don’t push past it	debug
Prove-It pattern	Failing test before fix	debug, tdd
Mock at boundaries	Mock external systems, not internal functions	tdd, test-review
DAMP over DRY	Descriptive tests over deduplicated tests	tdd
Rule of 3	Extract after three instances, not before	simplify, style-review
Chesterton’s Fence	Understand before removing	simplify
Hyrum’s Law	All observable behavior becomes a commitment	design, deprecation
Code as liability	Less code serving the same purpose is better	deprecation
Source over memory	Verify framework behavior in primary docs before implementation	build
Save-point pattern	Commit early when exploring uncertain changes	git
Evidence threshold	Concrete references, not speculation	review skills