Phase

Phase

One keyword, two or three sentences, and the skills that already exist for it.

Why this exists

[measured 2026-08-25] Across 558 transcripts over seven days, 4 of this plugin's 45 user-invocable skills fired at all. The other 41 fired zero times.

The split matters more than the total. Of those four, exactly one was reached by the model choosing it (rule-diagnosis, once). The other three were reached only because a person typed a slash command: brain 17 times, audit 11, auto-brain 3. A few skills are reachable by hand; the model-initiated channel is effectively dead. Those are different problems with different fixes.

An earlier version of this paragraph said "exactly one of 37 invocable skills". That read only the Skill-tool channel and missed slash commands entirely, which is the same defect this file is about: a measurement that answers a neighbouring question and gets reported as the whole picture.

They are not bad skills. They are unreachable ones: a skill nobody remembers to invoke is indistinguishable from a skill that does not exist, and the same sessions spent that week re-deriving things those skills already encode.

The fix is not more skills. It is a cheap entry point: a word you can say without deciding anything, which then names what matters now.

The phases

Each is: the two or three sentences that actually change the work, then the skills that already exist for it. Read the sentences; invoke the skills only if the work warrants it.

spec: before anything is built

Name the constraint, the deadline, what already exists, and the success criterion before proposing anything. State the verifiable success criterion before writing code, because a criterion invented afterwards is a description of what you happened to build. And research anything that depends on external behaviour (API caps, SDK versions, endpoints) rather than reasoning from internal consistency, which is not correctness.

Existing: spec, brainstorm, framework-radar, wizard, setup-project

design: before any UI change

Publish options before implementing, and ground every variant in the code first. Reading it once surfaced an already-built, never-wired component that turned a build task into a wiring task. Carry the surface's own invariants into every option; an option that silently breaks a rule the codebase already encodes is not a real option. Mockups are authoritative about surface, meaning palette, type, layout and motion, and silent about mechanism: navigation, information architecture, state.

Existing: design, /design (the canvas), artifact-design, a11y, rule-design-system, rule-thumb-first

build: while writing it

Touch only what was asked; clean up what your change orphans and mention the rest rather than fixing it. A bug is a family. On finding one, grep the value, the inverse, and the adjacent concept before calling it fixed. Fix the EVENT rather than the path in front of you, and scope the test to the event too, because a test bounded by your diff is a test that agrees with you.

Existing: auto, refactor, migrate, iterate, heal

verify: before claiming it works

Answer three questions of every probe: which build did it read, which surface, and which user state. If any answer is "I assumed", the probe has not run yet. Ask them of a FAILURE too. A red gets acted on without scrutiny, and a change made to working code is worse than the nothing a false green produces. Validate every "none found" against a known positive, and print the population beside the count.

Existing: test, preflight, review, grilling, show-your-work, rule-verification, rule-gate-integrity

ship: releasing it

Run the gate locally and read its exit status from the process, never through a pipe. A pipeline reports its last stage, so red reads as green. Re-read the version immediately before bumping rather than when you started; in a shared clone it moves under you. Verify the deploy on the live surface with a known-negative control, because a green "already up to date" describes a version number rather than the code behind it.

Existing: ship, commit, preflight, rule-local-first

audit: looking for what is wrong

A green gate is a claim, not evidence, so mutation-test it. A gate can be structurally incapable of firing, and that is invisible in the source because you read filters one at a time while the emptiness lives in their intersection. Every detector must demonstrate a hit on a known positive before its zero is believed, and it must print what it scanned: a report showing only a verdict is indistinguishable from a finder that returned nothing.

Existing: audit, scan, security, heal, perf, seo, learn-from-fixes

How to use it

Say the keyword. That is the whole interface. The point is that it costs nothing to reach for, because the measured failure was not bad judgement about which skill to use, it was never reaching for one at all.

If the phase is unclear, that is itself the finding: work that cannot be placed in a phase is usually work that skipped spec.

Keep this honest

The sentences above are the ones that have actually changed an outcome on this machine, not a summary of good practice. When a phase's advice stops earning its place, cut it. A phase carrying six sentences is one nobody reads, and this file becomes another skill that never fires.

Re-measure rather than trusting this. Invocation is countable, and there is a script for it that reads both channels, separates auto-loaded rule-* hits from chosen ones, prints the population it scanned, and refuses to report a zero total as a finding:

node plugins/autodev-core/scripts/analyze-skill-invocations.js --days 30

Do not hand-roll a grep for this. The obvious one-liner greps "skill":"..." and that is the Skill-tool channel only. A person typing /autodev-core:brain is recorded as a <command-name> block instead, so the naive count reports zero for a skill invoked seventeen times. That is exactly how the first version of the paragraph above came out tenfold too low.

If this skill is not in that output a month from now, it failed the same way the other 41 did, and the answer is not to write a 46th.