timharris707/skills

README preview

# Skills For Real Non-Engineers

I've led dev teams for over twenty years. I never wrote the code. These skills give me a lead developer who runs the team, so all I have to bring is the idea. Four shipped products so far.

Most of these skills started as someone else's. Fifteen are adapted from Matt Pocock's [Skills For Real Engineers](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills), three from [Lauren Tan](https://github.com/cursor/plugins/tree/main/pstack), five are mine. I rewrote nearly all of them for someone who won't read the code, then tied them together under one [orchestrator](./skills/run/orchestrate/SKILL.md) session that takes the idea, decides what gets grilled, mapped, prototyped, built, and reviewed, and runs the rest. That's what lets a non-engineer ship at production quality. I talk to that one session the way I've always talked to a dev lead.

Each skill is a `SKILL.md`, a plain-markdown playbook the agent reads on its own: every workflow I used to re-explain each session, written down once, installed in one line and versioned like software.

If you just want to install something, jump to [Installation](#installation-30-second-setup). If you want to know why any of this exists, read on; it's short.

## Why these skills exist

Every skill here started the same way: an agent failed me in a pattern, twice, and I got tired of re-explaining the fix. These are the four failures that cost me the most.

### The agent built the wrong thing

Nobody describes what they want completely, me included. I'd ask for a change, the agent would fill every unstated gap with a guess, and I'd find the guesses three files deep in the diff.

The fix is [grilling](./skills/decide/grilling/SKILL.md): the agent interviews me about the plan, in rounds, until nothing load-bearing is still assumed. Facts are the agent's job to go fetch; decisions stay mine. I run it before any change big enough to argue about, which turns out to be most of them.

View full repository on GitHub →