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tlc-discover

Interviews an unshaped idea into a verdict and a design document - decisions, flows, schema, contracts - that anyone can plan from without having been in the room. Use when the user says "research this", "help me understand this problem", "should we build this", "discovery", "explore this problem", or "tlc-discover". Do NOT use to cut a finished design into tasks, or to implement.

66

Quality

78%

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tessl review fix ./packages/skills-catalog/skills/(development)/tlc-discover/SKILL.md
SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Content

73%Weight 40%Scale 1-5

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

The body is a dense but genuinely instructive process skill: it sequences a multi-phase interview with explicit gates, stopping rules, a decision grid, worked examples, and a failure catalog, and it correctly defers the artifact template to a well-signaled reference file. Its main weakness is token economy — the aphoristic style restates each rule several times, inflating the context cost without adding guidance.

Suggestions

Tighten the prose: each critical rule is currently stated as an aphorism plus two or three restatements (e.g., rule 1 on proposing technology, or 'a spec wearing a design's clothes'); state the rule once and cut the rhetorical elaboration to reduce the ~330-line body materially.

Move the Common failures catalog and/or the Examples section into a references file (like document-format.md) and keep one-line summaries in SKILL.md, so the main body reads as an overview with well-signaled one-level-deep pointers.

Ground the remaining abstract directives ('Be incisive', 'propose the overall shape') with one concrete before/after illustration each, as the question sets and slice-naming rules already do.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The guidance is genuinely novel (no explanation of concepts Claude already knows), but nearly every rule is delivered with rhetorical elaboration — e.g., "the adjectives lose every time, and the adjectives are usually the customer", "a rubber stamp... paperwork people learn to route around", "a spec wearing a design's clothes". The same point is often restated two or three ways across ~330 lines, so the document could be tightened substantially without losing content; that matches "mostly efficient but includes some unnecessary explanation or could be tightened" rather than the noticeably-padded level 2.

3 / 5

Actionability

This is an instruction-only skill, and the guidance is concrete: exact question sets ("who hurts", "what it costs today", "what do they do instead"), a literal decision grid table, named edge states to probe ("Empty, first time, the retry, the half-finished, the expired, the unauthorised"), a template artifact via `references/document-format.md`, and three worked examples with numbered actions and results. It is not 5 because a portion of the direction stays abstract ("Be incisive", "propose the overall shape") without the concrete illustrations the question sets get, and the artifact itself is deferred to the reference file.

4 / 5

Workflow Clarity

The sequence is explicit and gated: SITUATION → PROBLEM → VERDICT → DECIDE, with hard checkpoints — "stop at a verdict and wait", "The user confirms before a single technical option is discussed", "get agreement before exploring" (Bound the round), "done when nothing answerable is left", and diagrams "checked against the repository before it lands". Error recovery is a dedicated Common failures section with cause/solution pairs, and the Examples section grounds the sequence in numbered action lists. This is an interview skill, not a destructive/batch operation, so no validation cap applies.

5 / 5

Progressive Disclosure

The one bundle file (`references/document-format.md`) is a real, well-signaled, one-level-deep reference with explicit load timing ("Read references/document-format.md when you write the .design/<name>.md artifact... Do not load it during the interview"), and the body is clearly sectioned. It is not 5 because the SKILL.md body itself runs ~330 lines of dense material — much of the interview doctrine and the failure catalog could live in reference files, leaving the overview leaner, which matches "good structure; most content is appropriately placed; minor organization gaps".

4 / 5

Total

16

/

20

Passed

Description

83%Weight 40%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 is strong: it uses third person, states a concrete capability with enumerated deliverables, provides explicit natural-language triggers, and adds a do-not-use clause that sharply separates it from planning and implementation skills. The only gaps are a handful of missing trigger synonyms and the broadness of "research this".

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

Quotes: "Interviews an unshaped idea into a verdict and a design document", "decisions, flows, schema, contracts" — it names the domain plus several concrete actions and deliverables. It is not a 5 because "interviews an unshaped idea" is somewhat abstract compared to a full verbatim action list (extract, fill, merge, convert); it is above 3 because multiple concrete outputs (verdict, decisions, flows, schema, contracts) are explicitly enumerated.

4 / 5

Completeness

It explicitly answers both parts: what ("Interviews an unshaped idea into a verdict and a design document - decisions, flows, schema, contracts") and when ("Use when the user says 'research this', 'should we build this', ..."). It also adds an explicit exclusion ("Do NOT use to cut a finished design into tasks, or to implement"), matching the anchor for clearly and explicitly answering both what AND when with concrete trigger phrases.

5 / 5

Trigger Term Quality

Quotes: "research this", "help me understand this problem", "should we build this", "discovery", "explore this problem", "tlc-discover" — these are natural phrases a user would actually say, covering several synonyms. It sits below 5 because common variations are still missing (e.g., "is this worth building", "requirements", "investigate this idea").

4 / 5

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

Quotes: "design document", "Do NOT use to cut a finished design into tasks, or to implement" — a clear niche with an explicit negative trigger distinguishing it from planning/implementation skills. It is not 5 because the trigger "research this" is broad and could overlap with general research or deep-research skills.

4 / 5

Total

17

/

20

Passed

Validation

100%

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

Validation — 16 / 16 Passed

Validation for skill structure

No warnings or errors.

Repository
tech-leads-club/agent-skills
Reviewed

Table of Contents

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