Arness Assessing

Comprehensive technical assessment of the codebase against stored patterns, followed by prioritized improvement identification. This is a first-citizen entry point that wraps arn-code-assess with a pre-flight check and provides chaining context to arn-implementing.

This skill is a medium orchestration wrapper. It MUST NOT duplicate arn-code-assess logic. All assessment work is done by the invoked skill (which has its own 7 internal gates). Arness-assessing handles: prerequisite checks, pre-flight validation, invoking the assess skill, and offering the chain exit.

Step 0: Ensure Configuration

Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/skills/arn-code-ensure-config/references/ensure-config.md and follow its instructions. This guarantees a user profile exists and ## Arness is configured with Arness Code fields before proceeding.

After Step 0 completes, extract the following from ## Arness:

• Code patterns — path to the directory containing stored pattern documentation

Workflow

Step 1: Pre-flight Check

Verify that pattern documentation exists at the configured Code patterns path:

• <code-patterns-dir>/code-patterns.md
• <code-patterns-dir>/testing-patterns.md
• <code-patterns-dir>/architecture.md

If any are missing: inform the user: "Pattern documentation is incomplete. The assessment needs stored patterns to compare against. Run /arn-planning first — it will generate pattern docs on first use." Do not proceed.

If all exist: inform the user briefly: "Pattern documentation found. Starting assessment..."

Step 2: Invoke Assess

Show progress:

Assessing: PRE-FLIGHT -> ASSESSMENT (scope -> analyze -> prioritize -> spec -> plan -> execute -> ship -> update-patterns)
                         ^^^^^^^^^^

Invoke the assess skill:

Skill: arn-code:arn-code-assess

The assess skill has its own 7 internal decision gates (scope selection, improvement selection, spec review, execution mode, etc.) and manages its own complete pipeline internally. Wait for it to complete.

Step 3: Completion Handoff

After arn-code-assess completes, offer the chain exit:

Ask (using AskUserQuestion):

"Assessment complete. What next?"

Options:

1. Implement improvements — Start implementing the identified fixes and improvements
2. Done — Exit

If Implement improvements: Skill: arn-code:arn-implementing If Done: Exit.

Error Handling

• ## Arness config missing: Handled by Step 0 (ensure-config) — this should not occur if Step 0 completed successfully.
• Pattern docs missing: Block with pre-flight message. Suggest running /arn-planning which will generate pattern docs on first use.
• arn-code-assess fails: Present the error. Ask: retry or abort.
• Assessment finds no improvements: Exit with "Codebase is healthy — no improvements needed." Do not offer implementing chain.