Standards Agent Skill

Standards — focused engineering guidance

Load the smallest set of standards justified by the caller's files, language,

and risks. Do not preload the entire reference corpus.

Procedure

• Record the supplied paths, language, change type, and risk cues.
• Load common-standards.md plus only the matching language or checklist

references.

• Compare the supplied artifact to those sources.
• Return cited findings with path and line when possible, plus checked and

not-checked scope.

• Stop.

This skill provides context and findings. It does not edit, validate, retry,

approve, commit, release, deliver, or decide continuation.

Mutation-safety standards

When the supplied change rewrites existing files in bulk — formatters,

codemods, migration scripts, generators pointed at hand-written sources —

check it against three standards and report each as a finding when absent:

• Single audited mutation chokepoint. All rewrites flow through one named

command or script whose inputs, outputs, and dry-run mode can be inspected.

Edits scattered across ad-hoc one-liners and manual touch-ups are the

diffuse mutation failure mode: no single point can be audited, re-run,

or blamed. Finding: name every mutation path outside the chokepoint.

• Hash-witnessed backups before rewrite. Before the chokepoint runs, the

originals are preserved with content hashes recorded (a committed baseline

counts), so "the rewrite changed only what it claims" is checkable

byte-for-byte, not asserted. Finding: a bulk rewrite with no verifiable

before-state.

• Self-administered ambition gate. The change states what it deliberately

does not touch, and the diff respects it. A formatter run that also renames,

a codemod that also refactors, is the scope-creep rewrite failure mode.

Finding: any file class in the diff outside the change's own stated scope.

Stop condition for this check: all three standards have an explicit pass or

finding; a bulk-rewrite review that reports style nits but skips these is

incomplete.

References

• Common standards
• Go
• Python
• Rust
• TypeScript
• JavaScript
• Shell
• JSON
• YAML
• Markdown
• SQL safety
• Race conditions
• LLM trust boundaries
• Skill structure
• Test strategy