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pragmatic-programmer

Apply meta-principles of software craftsmanship: DRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets, and design by contract. Use when the user mentions "best practices", "pragmatic approach", "broken windows", "tracer bullet", "software craftsmanship", "technical debt prevention", "prototype vs tracer bullet", or "code ownership". Also trigger when evaluating build-vs-buy decisions, designing estimation approaches, or choosing between reversible and irreversible architectural decisions. Covers estimation, domain languages, and reversibility. For code-level quality, see clean-code. For refactoring techniques, see refactoring-patterns.

Quality

84%

Does it follow best practices?

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SecuritybySnyk

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SKILL.md
Quality
Evals
Security

Quality

Content

65%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.

A well-organized reference skill with strong progressive disclosure (real, clearly signaled, one-level-deep reference files) and concrete pattern-level guidance. Its weaknesses are padded known-concept explanations and author biographies that inflate token cost, and the absence of an explicit workflow ordering the diagnostic, scoring, and improvement steps into a sequence.

Suggestions

Cut the "Why it works" paragraphs and "About the Authors" section — Claude already knows these concepts and the biographies add ~20 lines of pure padding; move any genuinely non-obvious rationale into the per-topic reference files.

Add a short numbered workflow (e.g., 1. Identify which principles apply, 2. Run the Quick Diagnostic questions, 3. Score 0-10 per the Scoring section, 4. List specific improvements) so the diagnostic table and scoring protocol form an explicit sequence.

Remove the duplicated "The Pragmatic Programmer Framework" heading (lines 10 and 24) and fold the 10/10 scoring protocol into the workflow to make the output contract unambiguous.

DimensionReasoningScore

Conciseness

The "Key insights" lists and application tables are dense and valuable, but every principle carries a "Core concept" and "Why it works" section re-explaining concepts Claude already knows (e.g., "Two components are orthogonal if changes in one do not affect the other"), plus a padded "About the Authors" section and a duplicated "The Pragmatic Programmer Framework" heading (lines 10 and 24). Mostly efficient, but several sections could be trimmed — matching the anchor at 3 rather than 2 because the bulk of each section genuinely earns its tokens.

3 / 5

Actionability

Concrete, specific guidance throughout: application tables with exact patterns ("`repo.save(user)`, not `pg.query(...)`", "`assert age >= 0, 'Age cannot be negative'"", the PERT formula), a Common Mistakes table with fixes, and an explicit output protocol in the Scoring section. Falls short of fully-executable anchor 5 only in that nothing is copy-paste runnable — acceptable for an instruction-only skill, but the guidance stays at the pattern level rather than the concrete-case level.

4 / 5

Workflow Clarity

The components of a workflow exist — a Scoring section ("rate it 0-10... Always provide the current score and specific improvements needed to reach 10/10") and a Quick Diagnostic table (question -> if no -> action) — but there is no explicit sequence tying them together; how to move from reading a design to a scored verdict with improvements is left implicit. Matches anchor 3 (sequence present but implicit, checkpoints scattered) rather than 4 (clear sequence).

3 / 5

Progressive Disclosure

The body is a genuine overview: each principle section ends with a clearly signaled one-level-deep reference ("See: [references/dry-orthogonality.md](references/dry-orthogonality.md)"), all six referenced files exist in references/, and a consolidated "Reference Files" index with one-line descriptions aids navigation. Matches the clear-overview anchor at 5.

5 / 5

Total

15

/

20

Passed

Description

96%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.

A strong description that clearly and explicitly states what the skill does and when to use it, with an unusually comprehensive set of natural trigger phrases and explicit boundary pointers to sibling skills. The only weakness is the broad "best practices" trigger, which risks overlap with other code-quality skills.

Suggestions

Replace or narrow the generic trigger "best practices" with more distinctive phrases (e.g., "pragmatic programmer principles" or "stone soup") to reduce overlap with clean-code and other quality skills.

Add "DRY", "don't repeat yourself", and "orthogonality" as explicit trigger terms since users are more likely to name the principle than the book.

DimensionReasoningScore

Specificity

The description names the domain and enumerates the skill's concrete scope comprehensively: "DRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets, and design by contract" plus "Covers estimation, domain languages, and reversibility". Coverage matches the skill's actual content with no material gaps, matching the comprehensive-coverage anchor rather than the minor-gaps anchor at 4.

5 / 5

Completeness

It explicitly answers both questions: the what ("Apply meta-principles of software craftsmanship: DRY, orthogonality...") and the when ("Use when the user mentions..." and "Also trigger when evaluating build-vs-buy decisions...") with concrete trigger phrases, exactly matching the anchor-5 example pattern.

5 / 5

Trigger Term Quality

Natural phrases users would actually say are comprehensively listed: "best practices", "pragmatic approach", "broken windows", "tracer bullet", "software craftsmanship", "technical debt prevention", "prototype vs tracer bullet", "code ownership", plus build-vs-buy and estimation situations. DRY and orthogonality appear in the what-clause, further aiding triggering.

5 / 5

Distinctiveness Conflict Risk

The niche is clear with explicit disambiguation ("For code-level quality, see clean-code. For refactoring techniques, see refactoring-patterns"), but the generic trigger "best practices" could plausibly fire for many other engineering skills, creating minor overlap risk — matching the mostly-distinct anchor at 4 rather than the minimal-conflict anchor at 5.

4 / 5

Total

19

/

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

valeriibeck-star/claude-skills

Path

skills/pragmatic-programmer/SKILL.md

Reviewed

Table of Contents

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