Oss Standards

oss-standards

Grida is open source. CI checks catch the mechanical failures — format, lint, typecheck, tests, typos, generated-file freshness. This skill is the extra bar a reviewer enforces because the repo is public, the threat model is public, and the audience for every artifact in a PR includes a stranger who arrived via Google.

The defaults that flip:

• Public-by-default. Names, comments, fixtures, screenshots, commit messages — assume a stranger reads them first. There is no internal channel; everything is the channel.
• Push = publish. A secret in a branch push is a published secret, even if you delete the commit five minutes later. "I'll redact before merge" is not a plan; rotation is.
• Incomplete is worse than absent. "I'll finish it next PR" lands on main, gets indexed, and becomes the example the next contributor copies. Use draft: true, defer the PR, or just don't ship — but don't ship half.

Code

Beyond what CI catches and what CLAUDE.md / naming / code-ts / code-react already enforce:

• No personal TODOs. // TODO(me): …, "fix later", "@username knows" — private notes published. Either resolve, or rewrite as a neutral TODO with a tracking issue link.
• No machine-specific paths. See the links pre-commit gate — absolute paths, ~/scratch/..., /tmp/..., and untracked references resolve to nothing for anyone else.
• One concern per PR. A reviewer in public cannot accept half a PR; bundled unrelated changes are unreviewable. Split or rebase.
• New public surface is a semver commitment. YAGNI applies everywhere, but in OSS the cost of adding an exported name today is the deprecation path you owe tomorrow. Wait for the second caller.

For bug fixes specifically, the etiology skill is mandatory — bandaids in main become tribal knowledge that external contributors have no access to.

Security

The full boundary discipline lives in the security skill — GRIDA-SEC-<id> tags, the mandatory review before commit. Two extra OSS gates on top, both because push = publish:

• Secrets in diffs, fixtures, or tests. Any credential, signing key, Stripe/Metronome id, webhook signature, or production-shaped URL committed has been published the moment the branch is pushed. Use .env.local (gitignored) and fixture placeholders.
• Internal URLs and screenshots. Webhook URLs, dev-tunnel URLs, staging hosts, dashboard links, and screenshots that show real org slugs, account ids, or tenant data leak the same way. A doc PR with a real org slug visible in the screenshot chrome is a published org slug.

If a GRIDA-SEC-<id> tag appears anywhere in your diff, the security skill's review runs first; this skill's cleaning pass is downstream of that.

Docs and prose

Anything user-facing — README, docs/**, blog post, in-product copy, the PR description itself — has an audience that doesn't share your context.

Name the reader before writing. One sentence: "an external contributor first opening the repo," "a designer evaluating Grida vs Figma," "an agent grounding before a refactor." If you can't name the reader, the page doesn't know what it is — and that surfaces as prose that hedges, repeats, or assumes.

• No "we know that…" prose. "We" is the maintainers; the reader is someone else. Explain the fact or link to where it lives.
• No private references. Slack threads, internal tickets, "as we discussed" — invisible to the reader.
• Link form follows the rendering surface. See the links skill — local-only or untracked targets are correctness bugs in OSS, not style.
• Ship-or-draft is the doc taxonomy gate. draft: true is the honest answer when a page isn't useful enough yet; shipping a half-page because "something is better than nothing" is not. See docs/AGENTS.md.

The cleaning pass

Final pass before opening the PR. For every file touched, ask literally:

If a stranger reads this file with no context, does it help them, or does it leave a question they cannot answer?

Apply the answer:

• Helps → keep.
• Recoverable question → fix it (rename, expand the doc, add the one comment that explains the non-obvious constraint).
• Unrecoverable question → drop the file, the code block, the doc section, the fixture, the screenshot.

The bias is to drop. A confusing artifact in main outlives the PR and is the first thing the next contributor finds when they grep.

Common removals on this pass:

• Scratch files committed by mistake (tmp.ts, notes.md, unnamed fixtures, snapshots from a one-off debug run).
• Half-written doc pages with no audience or no conclusion — draft: true or delete.
• TODO blocks that reference internal context.
• Examples or fixtures that don't run or aren't referenced.
• Inline comments that paraphrase code instead of stating the non-obvious why (per the repo-wide rule in CLAUDE.md).

The PR description and commit message

These are public artifacts permanently linked from the diff.

• Commit message makes git log a useful index. "fix" is not a commit message; neither is "updates".
• PR description lets a future contributor reconstruct why the change exists without reading the diff line by line. Bug fix → name the diagnostic-ladder rung (etiology). Feature → name the audience and the concrete use case that pulled it in.

The short version

• Public-by-default. Push = publish. Nothing is internal.
• CI catches the mechanical. This skill catches the rest.
• Secrets, internal URLs, machine paths, screenshots with real data — published on push; rotation is the only remedy.
• Docs name the reader, or they don't know what they are.
• Final pass: every artifact justifies itself to a stranger, or it drops. Bias is to drop.
• The PR description and commit message are the permanent index. Write them as such.

See also: security, links, etiology, naming, code-ts, code-react, pedantic (when you want a hard critique before opening the PR).