code-prior-art-survey — SKILL.md

Variant: standard · invoked with a procedure request + input file paths; returns schema-validated artifacts; control passes back to the caller.

Overview

Before designing a software system, find how the open-source world has already solved it — including the smallest real repository, not just the famous ones. This skill teaches that survey as four procedures sharing one set of contracts: deriving a keyword map (the typed search vocabulary that drives everything downstream), executing a search angle (one discovery mechanism worked across its sources, producing reproducible, coverage-audited candidate records), deep-reading one candidate into an extraction, and synthesizing the extract set into a report + borrow-index. Outputs are machine-checkable: JSON Schemas in schemas/ are the authoritative contracts and scripts/validate_prior_art.py is the deterministic gate. Inputs are free-form — any scope context the caller hands over; outputs are schema-bound wherever they are produced.