reviewing-developer-guide — SKILL.md

Variant: standard · When to use: judging a finished (or amended) developer guide as an acceptance gate — checking a developer can adopt, integrate, and operate the tool from it, then emitting VERDICT: approve|revise with actionable findings.

Overview

This skill is the review half of an authoring/judging developer-guide pair. Loaded by a reviewer who holds a finished developer guide — the adoption + integration narrative for a developer-tool product (SDK, library, CLI, framework, or API platform): a signposted start-here, a getting-started, the core concepts, code-centric integration how-tos, an end-to-end tutorial, production best-practices, a troubleshooting path, and pointers out to the api-reference — it judges that guide against one question: can a developer install the tool, grasp its mental model, complete the common integration scenarios, recover from the common errors, and operate it in production from this guide alone, with runnable code, where every step matches what the tool actually does? It applies a fixed adoptability + accuracy checklist — the same bar a developer-guide author produces to, so produce-bar and review-bar do not drift — then emits a single machine-parseable verdict plus findings the author can act on in one revision pass. It is an acceptance gate: it does not author, fix, or rewrite the guide; it judges and returns findings, and the producer revises.

Single-sourced bar. The fourteen conditions in Step 2 are not invented here. They are the adoptability + accuracy bar authoring-developer-guide produces to (its Step-5 self-check, 1:1) — distilled in references/adoptability-bar.md — so the review-bar and produce-bar are one bar.

Medium (today). The guide under review is markdown (prose plus fenced install/integration code), not a rendered docs site. The review method and bar are medium-independent — a future Figma/Confluence/rendered-docs backend changes only the medium, not what this skill checks.

When to activate

• A finished developer guide needs an accept/revise decision before it ships to integrating developers.
• You are the independent reviewer / gate for a developer guide a producer just authored.
• Re-judging a revised developer guide after a prior revise verdict.
• Judging an AMEND — a delta on an already-shipped guide (e.g. the tool shipped a new version) — delta-scoped (cond-12).