Claude Cortex

Use when performing git operations or generating smart commit messages - provides safe git workflow guidance, validation checks, and conventional commit formatting.

Use this skill when writing blog posts, articles, or long-form web content—from quick how-to guides to in-depth opinion pieces. Trigger phrases: 'write a blog post about', 'draft an article on', 'create a post for my blog'. Do NOT use for academic papers, news reporting, or content requiring real-time facts.

Multi-perspective UX review combining usability heuristics, WCAG accessibility checks, and interaction design analysis. Use when reviewing UI components before release, evaluating user flows for usability issues, conducting design critiques, or auditing accessibility compliance.

Use this skill when crafting microcopy, UI text, or in-product writing—error messages, tooltips, button labels, empty states, onboarding flows, and confirmation dialogs. Trigger phrases: 'write microcopy for', 'write UI copy', 'write error messages', 'write onboarding text', 'button label for'. Do NOT use for marketing copy (use copywriter) or long-form documentation (use technical-writer).

Task tracking system for agents via Backlog.md CLI. Use when creating deferred issues during implementation, filing audit findings, working assigned tasks, or managing project work. Optimized for agent workflows: structured issue filing, priority/labeling system, and task completion tracking.

Use this skill when writing persuasive, conversion-focused copy—landing pages, product descriptions, ads, sales emails, or any content designed to move someone to action. Trigger phrases: 'write copy for my landing page', 'describe this product', 'write an ad for'. Do NOT use for informational content, technical documentation, or long-form editorial writing.

Automates browser interactions for web testing, form filling, screenshots, and data extraction. Use when the user needs to navigate websites, interact with web pages, fill forms, take screenshots, test web applications, or extract information from web pages.

Complete operational workflow for implementer agents (Codex, Gemini, etc.) making code changes and writing tests. Drives all work through atomic commits — each loop operates on the smallest complete, reviewable change. Defines the Code Change Loop, Test Writing Loop, Lint Gate, and Issue Filing process with circuit breakers, severity levels, and escalation rules. Requires `cortex git commit` for all commits. Includes bundled provider-aware review scripts that keep same-model shell-outs as the last resort, plus a fresh-context Codex fallback for code review and test audit. Use this skill when starting any implementation task.

Use this skill when reviewing written content for grammar, spelling, punctuation, style consistency, and tone—before publishing, submitting, or sending. Trigger phrases: 'proofread this', 'check my writing', 'review this for errors', 'edit this email/report/essay'. Do NOT use when structural rewrites or content changes are needed—proofreading fixes surface errors, not substantive problems.

Use this skill when writing fiction, narrative nonfiction, brand stories, or any content where emotional engagement and narrative arc matter more than pure information delivery. Trigger phrases: 'write a short story', 'tell my brand's origin story', 'write a narrative about', 'create a character'. Do NOT use for purely informational content, technical writing, or persuasive copy without a narrative component.

Review test quality and audit test coverage for any module. This skill should be used when reviewing existing tests, auditing test gaps, writing new tests, or when asked to assess test health. It pipelines testing standards into the audit workflow to produce a prioritized gap report. The output is a report, not code — do not write test implementations until the report is reviewed.

Use this skill when verifying factual claims, checking accuracy of statements, or assessing the credibility of information. Trigger phrases: 'fact-check this', 'is this true', 'verify this claim', 'check if this is accurate'. Do NOT use for subjective opinions, legal or medical advice, or claims requiring real-time data or breaking news.

Use this skill when building, explaining, or debugging regular expressions for pattern matching, validation, or text extraction. Trigger phrases: 'write a regex', 'match this pattern', 'validate this format', 'extract from text'. Not for natural language parsing or full grammar parsing (use a parser instead).

Use when preparing a production release or release candidate - provides a checklist-driven workflow for validation, versioning, build optimization, documentation updates, and deployment readiness.

Use when a repository needs cleanup of dead code, build artifacts, unused dependencies, outdated docs, or stale tests - provides safe cleanup workflows, validation steps, and reporting templates for code, deps, docs, tests, and sprint archives.

Maximum visual excellence for any UI platform. Use when building user interfaces, styling components, or polishing visual elements.

Use when activating visual showcase modes (supersaiyan, kamehameha, over9000) for UI or interaction design - provides mode-specific enhancement checklists.

User-triggered audit that finds wiring drift between a project's UI surfaces and backend capabilities — orphan surfaces (UI calls endpoints/hooks/procedures that no longer exist), unwired capabilities (backend routes/exports that nothing surfaces), shape drift (both exist but contracts mismatch), method drift (URL matches, HTTP verb does not), validation drift (frontend vs backend rules diverged), permission drift (UI exposes what backend forbids or vice versa), stale labels (UI text references renamed backend concepts), and unsurfaced configuration (env vars or flags that gate behavior with no UI or CLI to control them). This skill should be used when the user asks to "audit our wiring," "find UI/backend drift," "find unwired capabilities," "find stale surfaces," "check for contract violations," "find unused endpoints," "find unused hooks," "what mismatches between UI and backend," or any similar request whose deliverable is a prioritized findings report rather than a descriptive snapshot. Generic across UI

Use when writing tasks produce prose artifacts (READMEs, docs, PR text, tutorials, guides, posts, release notes) and need a fast surface scan for AI tells. Auto-engages on prose writing tasks; checks banned punctuation, stock vocabulary, and mechanical patterns. For the structural judgment pass on rhythm and rhetorical reflexes, use ai-tells-review. Not a replacement for voice skills like nick-voice; this removes machine fingerprints, it does not add a target voice.

Use this skill when creating data visualizations, selecting the right chart type, or generating chart code. Trigger phrases: 'build a chart', 'visualize this data', 'create a graph', 'plot these numbers', 'which chart should I use for'. Not for building interactive dashboards, designing UI components, or creating infographics with design tools like Figma.

Use this skill when creating, evaluating, or documenting color palettes for brands, products, or design systems. Trigger phrases: 'create a color palette', 'what colors should I use', 'brand colors for', 'accessible color scheme'. Do NOT use for image editing, photo color correction, or print production color matching.

Use when running builds, executing tests, or improving developer experience workflows - provides structured guidance for build/test execution and DX improvement.

Use this skill when building evaluation frameworks to measure LLM quality, safety, accuracy, or alignment including test suites, human eval rubrics, automated evals, and metrics design. Not for training or fine-tuning models. Not for dataset curation or benchmark comparison across publicly available models.

User-triggered orchestrator that walks the user through running multiple sibling mapping/audit/doc skills against a shared scope, then assembles their outputs into one navigable artifact. Coaches rather than auto-runs — at each step the orchestrator presents the next sibling skill, recommended scope inheritance, and approval gate; the user invokes the sibling and confirms before moving on. Resolves the prior arch-analysis lookup once at suite start so every sibling skill inherits the same scope. Records each run's output path in a suite manifest. Produces a combined navigation HTML that links to each sibling's standalone HTML for one-stop sharing. Ships two named recipes — "release-driver onboarding" (for tooling that drives releases) and "deployed-system onboarding" (for systems that get deployed) — and supports custom plans. Trigger on "run our mapping suite," "do a complete onboarding," "build the combined report," "I need to onboard to system X," "give me the full picture of this codebase," or when the us

Meta-skill for auditing and validating skill quality. Use when reviewing skills for consistency, completeness, accuracy, and adherence to standards. Provides structured rubrics, scoring frameworks, and actionable recommendations.

Guide for creating effective skills. Use when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Claude's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.

Use when designing system architecture, APIs, components, or data models - provides a structured design workflow with validation and documentation outputs.

Use this skill when planning or conducting user research, writing interview guides, designing surveys for UX insights, synthesizing qualitative findings, creating personas, or writing research reports. Trigger phrases: 'write a user interview guide', 'how do I conduct usability testing', 'synthesize research findings', 'create a user persona', 'design a UX survey'. Not for quantitative market sizing (use market-researcher), writing business requirements (use business-analyst), or product analytics.

Comprehensive secure coding guide covering OWASP web vulnerabilities with prevention patterns and checklists. Use when writing or reviewing web application code to prevent XSS, CSRF, SSRF, SQL injection, access control flaws, and other common security vulnerabilities.

Use this skill when a working tree contains uncommitted changes that need to be split into a sequence of atomic commits — typically after a long session, an agent hand-off, a rebase resolution, or anytime `git status` shows mixed work that was not committed as it landed. The skill assumes the agent has fresh context and did not author most of the diff, so it treats the working tree as evidence to investigate before grouping. Optimizes for `git bisect`: each commit is the smallest buildable and deployable unit, and no smaller. Uses `cortex git commit` for file-level commits and `cortex git patch --diff` when unrelated changes share a file.

Use this skill when you face a complex or high-stakes decision and need a structured framework to evaluate options objectively. Ideal for career choices, product prioritization, vendor selection, or any multi-criteria trade-off. Not for trivial daily decisions or situations that require licensed professional advice.

Use when you've developed a broadly useful skill and want to contribute it upstream via pull request - guides process of branching, committing, pushing, and creating PR to contribute skills back to upstream repository

Use when selecting between MCP tools based on task complexity and requirements - provides a structured selection workflow and decision rationale.

Use this skill when you need to research a topic online, gather information from multiple sources, or evaluate source credibility. Trigger phrases: 'research', 'find information about', 'look up', 'investigate'. Not for academic systematic reviews (use literature-reviewer) or fact-checking specific claims (use fact-checker).

Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment - applies TDD to process documentation by testing with subagents before writing, iterating until bulletproof against rationalization

Use when public prose still sounds machine-written after ai-tells-scan. Complements ai-tells-scan's mechanical pass with structural judgment: rhythm, hedging, rhetorical reflexes, and performative emphasis. Trigger on 'review for AI tells,' 'does this read AI,' 'strip the AI smell,' or 'make this less AI.'

Use this skill when designing, cleaning, deduplicating, or documenting datasets for model training and evaluation including schema design, class imbalance handling, and train/val/test splits. Not for running model training or hyperparameter tuning. Not for real-time data pipeline engineering.

Systematic documentation audit and maintenance. This skill should be used when documentation may be stale, missing, or misorganized — after feature work, refactors, dependency upgrades, or as a periodic health check. It prescribes folder structure for docs/ and manual/, dispatches haiku subagents for codebase/doc scanning, and routes doc creation to specialized agents (reference-builder, technical-writer, learning-guide) with docs-architect as quality gate.

Use this skill when specifying, designing, or documenting UI components, layouts, and design systems for frontend implementation. Trigger phrases: 'design this UI component', 'create a responsive layout', 'spec the CSS for', 'design system for'. Do NOT use for backend development, server-side logic, data engineering, or writing server code.

Audit static HTML files for on-page SEO, content quality, easy-win performance signals, and crawlability. This skill should be used when the user asks to review, audit, or check the SEO of one or more static HTML files — e.g., "review the HTML for SEO issues", "audit this landing page", "check SEO on these pages before I publish". Static HTML only — does not cover Jekyll/Hugo/Astro/Next.js source, off-page factors, or live-rendered Core Web Vitals.

Use this skill when authoring or refactoring a justfile (and matching Makefile wrapper) for one of Nick's projects. Triggers when the user asks to "create a justfile", "add a justfile to this project", "set up just for…", "wire up tmux services", "scaffold the task runner", or when working in a repo that lacks a justfile but obviously needs one. Produces a justfile using zsh syntax with the standard svc-* tmux service family, the canonical build/lint/dev/test recipes, a thin Makefile passthrough wrapper that auto-installs just, and per-service tx-start.sh helpers. Do NOT use for editing existing third-party justfiles or non-Nick projects unless the user explicitly opts in.

Use this skill whenever working inside any of Nick's repos (under ~/Developer/) or whenever a conversation touches Nick's durable cross-cutting work — Atlas Crew product strategy/brand/planning, the Unanet job, job search, interviews, tax amendment, foreclosure/tenant situation, strategic positioning. Maps Nick's three Basic Memory projects (products, work, main) and the per-repo dev trackers, and says which layer owns which kind of question. Consult before reasoning from stored memory summaries about repo architecture, product decisions, active priorities, or ongoing personal/career state — stored memory is lossy; the trackers and the Basic Memory projects are the real artifacts and should be consulted first.

Use this skill when writing product requirements documents, prioritizing features, creating user stories, defining acceptance criteria, or setting product metrics. Trigger phrases: 'write a PRD for', 'prioritize this feature backlog', 'write user stories for', 'help me define acceptance criteria', 'what metrics should we track for'. Not for writing code, designing UI mockups, or conducting user research interviews.

Use when generating tests for new or existing code to improve coverage - provides a structured workflow for analyzing code, creating tests, and validating coverage goals.

Design and write hands-on tutorials with progressive disclosure, exercises, and troubleshooting sections. Use when creating learning content, workshops, or step-by-step guides.

Use when filing, updating, sequencing, or querying tasks in any atlas-crew repo (Facet + the Atlas Crew Security repos: Apparatus, Chimera, Crucible, Synapse, Bridge). These repos track work in GitHub Issues on Projects v2 boards, NOT backlog.md. Covers the two boards, the Type/Area/Status field model, cross-repo Initiative grouping, gh seq execution ordering, and the non-obvious gh/GraphQL mechanics for setting issue types and project fields. Trigger on: file an issue, create a task, set priority/type/area/status, add to board, what should I work on next, execution order, sequencing, blocked-by, milestone, where does this task go.

Use this skill when gathering and documenting business requirements, mapping processes, performing gap analysis, writing business requirements documents (BRDs), or modeling stakeholder impact. Trigger phrases: 'write a business requirements document', 'map this process', 'gather requirements for', 'gap analysis for', 'AS-IS TO-BE process'. Not for writing user stories (use product-manager skill), conducting user research (use ux-researcher), or financial modeling.

Use when explaining code, concepts, or system behavior to a specific audience level - provides a structured explanation workflow with depth control and validation steps.

Regulatory compliance auditing across GDPR, HIPAA, PCI DSS, SOC 2, and ISO frameworks with automated evidence collection and gap analysis. Use when conducting compliance assessments, preparing for certifications, or implementing regulatory controls.

Use when invalid data causes failures deep in execution, requiring validation at multiple system layers - validates at every layer data passes through to make bugs structurally impossible

Use this skill when reviewing, evaluating, or giving structured feedback on UI designs, wireframes, mockups, or design systems. Trigger phrases: 'critique this design', 'give feedback on my UI', 'review this wireframe', 'what's wrong with this design'. Do NOT use for writing code, implementing designs, or marketing material critique.

Orchestrate a full documentation health audit across five dimensions: structural health, semantic accuracy, topic completeness, prose quality, and information architecture. Runs each phase in dependency order with phase gating. This skill should be used for pre-release audits, periodic health checks, or comprehensive documentation assessments.

GitOps workflows and patterns using ArgoCD and Flux for declarative Kubernetes deployments. Use when implementing CI/CD for Kubernetes, managing multi-environment deployments, or adopting declarative infrastructure practices.

Use this skill when comparing AI or LLM models on benchmarks, capability, cost, latency, context window, or task-specific fit to help teams select the right model for their use case and budget. Not for training or fine-tuning models. Not for building eval frameworks from scratch.

User-triggered analysis of how a system gets deployed and recovered — across local (Docker Compose) and cloud (Kubernetes / Eve) release surfaces. Produces mermaid diagrams plus cited reports for promotion paths, environment topology, configuration provenance, and recovery procedures under docs/release/<date>/. Layers on top of architectural-analysis: when a recent docs/architecture/<date>/ report exists, this skill ingests its control-flow, integrations, and failure-modes findings rather than re-deriving them. When verifying cloud-side claims, prefers eve-mcp tools (ShowEnvironments, GetManifest, ShowChannels, ShowDeploymentCrons) over reading manifest YAML by hand. Trigger on "map our release," "trace the promotion path," "where does this config come from," "what's the rollback story," "diagram the environments," "show how a version reaches prod," or any release-shaped question whose deliverable is a diagram plus a cited report. Not for new architectural snapshots (use architectural-analysis), CI pipeline c

Use this skill when you need to draft Terms of Service, a Privacy Policy, or an End-User License Agreement (EULA) for a web application, SaaS product, or mobile app. Produces comprehensive, plain-English legal documents that cover user rights, data practices, liability limits, and dispute resolution. Not a substitute for a licensed attorney; have a lawyer review before publishing for a production product.

Compressed communication using symbols and abbreviations. Use when context is limited or brevity is needed.

Automate code review remediation loops with the codex CLI. Requests reviews from codex, classifies findings by severity (P0-P4), fixes critical issues (P0/P1) through iterative cycles, defers quality improvements to backlog, and escalates after 3 review cycles. Use when working with code that needs structured remediation: 'codex review' in a request triggers this workflow.

Incident triage, cascade prevention, and postmortem methodology. Use when handling production incidents, designing resilience patterns, or conducting chaos engineering exercises.

Use this skill when sizing a market, analyzing competitors, designing customer surveys, segmenting audiences, or synthesizing research into market insights. Trigger phrases: 'size the market for', 'analyze our competitors', 'who is our target customer', 'design a survey to understand', 'TAM/SAM/SOM for'. Not for building financial models, writing pitch decks, or conducting UX usability research.