mentor

Senior Staff Engineer mentor for architecture, design decisions, technical mentorship, and career guidance. Use when seeking senior-level perspective on system design, code review, technical strategy, or career growth.

Quality

49%

Does it follow best practices?

Run evals on this skill

Adds up to 20 points to the overall score

View guide

Securityby

Passed

No findings from the security scan

Fix and improve this skill with Tessl

tessl review fix ./plugins/dev-skills/skills/mentor/SKILL.md

Quality

Content

23%Scale 1-5

Reviews the quality of instructions and guidance provided to agents. Good implementation is clear, handles edge cases, and produces reliable results.

This skill is extremely verbose, spending most of its ~250 lines explaining soft skills, communication patterns, and mentorship philosophy that Claude already understands. It lacks concrete, actionable guidance—there are no executable code examples, specific tools, or precise outputs. The content would benefit enormously from being reduced to ~50 lines of truly novel instruction with the review template optionally in a separate file.

Suggestions

Reduce content to ~50 lines by removing sections Claude already knows (communication style, anti-patterns, mentorship philosophy, identity description) and keeping only the review framework template and task routing logic.

Add concrete, actionable output examples: show what a completed review should look like with specific code snippets, not just a blank template.

Split the review framework template into a separate REVIEW_TEMPLATE.md file and reference it from the main skill to improve progressive disclosure.

Add specific validation steps to the workflow, e.g., 'After generating review, verify all concerns have Impact and Recommendation fields filled' to create feedback loops.

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Conciseness	Extremely verbose at ~250+ lines. Extensively explains concepts Claude already knows: what a mentor does, how to ask questions, communication tone, anti-patterns for conversation. The 'Your Identity' and 'Your Role' sections describe generic soft skills. The Socratic method examples, balanced feedback structure, and communication principles are all things Claude inherently understands. Very little here is novel information that Claude couldn't infer from a 10-line prompt.	1 / 5
Actionability	The skill is almost entirely abstract guidance and philosophical direction rather than concrete, executable steps. There are no code examples, no specific commands beyond the CLI usage block, and the review framework is a template rather than actionable instruction. The 'Task Execution' section provides high-level routing but lacks specific implementation details for what Claude should actually do or output.	2 / 5
Workflow Clarity	The Task Execution section provides a basic routing workflow (--review, --career, general) and the general mentorship path has a 6-step sequence. However, there are no validation checkpoints, no feedback loops, and the steps are vague ('Understand Context', 'Ask Clarifying Questions'). The review framework template provides some structure but lacks explicit verification steps.	3 / 5
Progressive Disclosure	This is a monolithic wall of content with no references to external files and no bundle files. The extensive review framework template, communication guidelines, and example dialogues could easily be split into separate reference files. All content is inlined in a single long document with no navigation aids beyond section headers.	2 / 5
	Total	8 / 20 Passed

Description

75%Scale 1-5

Based on the skill's description, can an agent find and select it at the right time? Clear, specific descriptions lead to better discovery.

The description has strong completeness with explicit 'what' and 'when' clauses, and decent trigger term coverage. However, it lacks specificity in concrete actions—listing categories rather than specific things the skill does—and has moderate overlap risk with other code review, architecture, or career-focused skills.

Suggestions

Add concrete actions the skill performs, e.g., 'Reviews architecture proposals for scalability trade-offs, provides code review feedback at a senior level, advises on technical decision documents'

Improve distinctiveness by emphasizing what makes this different from a generic code review or architecture skill, e.g., 'Provides opinionated senior engineering perspective combining technical depth with organizational context'

Dimension	Reasoning	Score
Specificity	Names the domain (engineering mentorship) and lists several areas (architecture, design decisions, technical mentorship, career guidance), but these are high-level categories rather than concrete actions. No specific verbs describing what the skill actually does (e.g., 'reviews architecture diagrams', 'provides trade-off analysis').	3 / 5
Completeness	Clearly answers both 'what' (Senior Staff Engineer mentor for architecture, design decisions, technical mentorship, and career guidance) and 'when' (Use when seeking senior-level perspective on system design, code review, technical strategy, or career growth) with explicit trigger phrases.	5 / 5
Trigger Term Quality	Includes several natural keywords users might say: 'architecture', 'design decisions', 'code review', 'technical strategy', 'career growth', 'system design', 'mentorship'. Missing some variations like 'tech lead advice', 'promotion', 'staff engineer', 'scaling', 'trade-offs', but overall good coverage.	4 / 5
Distinctiveness Conflict Risk	Could overlap with general code review skills, architecture skills, or career coaching skills. The 'Senior Staff Engineer' framing provides some distinction, but terms like 'code review' and 'system design' are broad enough to conflict with more specialized skills in those areas.	3 / 5
	Total	15 / 20 Passed

Validation

81%

Warnings & errors only

Checks the skill against the spec for correct structure and formatting. All validation checks must pass before discovery and implementation can be scored.

Validation — 9 / 11 Passed

Validation for skill structure

Criteria	Description	Result
allowed_tools_field	'allowed-tools' contains unusual tool name(s)	Warning
frontmatter_unknown_keys	Unknown frontmatter key(s) found; consider removing or moving to metadata	Warning

	Total	9 / 11 Passed

Repository: rikdc/ai-skills
Path: plugins/dev-skills/skills/mentor/SKILL.md
Commit: a43676e

Reviewed: 3 days ago

Table of Contents

Discovery Implementation Validation

Is this your skill?

If you maintain this skill, you can claim it as your own. Once claimed, you can manage eval scenarios, bundle related skills, attach documentation or rules, and ensure cross-agent compatibility.