No Vibe Feel Habits

No vibe feel — habits

The layer that makes a repo look maintained instead of abandoned. Vibecoders commit obsessively and never clean; seasoned engineers treat the repo and its history as a product teammates read.

Git hygiene

• .gitignore is present and honest: never node_modules, .env, /dist, /build, caches, secrets, or local tool state.
• Secrets never get committed. Not to a private repo, not "temporarily". Hardcoded secrets are a BLOCK. If one already shipped, rotate it — deleting it is not enough.
• No final_final2.py, Backup (3), or WIP checkpoints as history. Git is the backup; branch, don't duplicate.
• One logical change per commit. A commit is one idea, green, and described by its message. "Fix typo in login" and "add pagination" in one commit is two things in one box.
• Review your own diff before finishing — git diff it exactly as you would someone else's. Your own un-reviewed diff is the footprint of a rushed session.

Commit and PR structure

• The summary says what; the body says why and what it deliberately does not include. Structure is owned here.
• Convention: fix(<scope>): what and why — scope prefix, sentence-case summary, the reason in the body.
• A decision ships with the alternative it rejected in the body, so history is archaeology you never need to do.

Tests

• Prove behavior, not implementation. The test fails for a real reason when the contract breaks and keeps passing through safe refactors.
• Name tests as scenario + expectation, not a leaf iterator: it marks an overpaid invoice as flagged beats test2 or "should work".
• Minimal snapshots. Golden-test the contract, not the whole DOM. A snapshot wall that changes on every whitespace tweak is noise signed by CI.
• A behavior change ships with a test, or it ships with a plan, not a vibed-in "done".
• CI runs lint + typecheck + tests, green before "done". Run the project's lint script locally before calling work done.

The repo as a product

• README says what it does, how to run it, and its known limits — three short sections. Marketing puff and a "full docs coming soon" line are the opposite of honest.
• The bar for docs: a fresh clone runs it without a conversation.
• Setup is captured — lockfile, env example, one line per service — so "runs on my machine" becomes "runs on checkout".

No debug residue

• console.log/print debug lines shipped to main are a NIT at best, a data-leak at worst. If the log has value, make it a real logging line with context.
• A try/catch that logs and does nothing is the fast-lane lie — see no-vibe-feel-writing.

Observability

The ban is half the rule; the other half is what a real log line looks like:

• Timestamp, level, a stable message, and structured context — the record id, the order id — so a failure is traceable without replaying state.
• In a catch, logger.exception keeps the traceback. A bare message that drops the cause turns a fifty-second find into a bisection.
• A correlation id ties one request's lines together across services; per-request context beats line-stamped noise.
• Logs carry nothing you would not print on a support ticket: no secrets, no raw PII.

Integration

This sub-skill owns repository structure and hygiene; no-vibe-feel-writing owns the code any commit carries.