Tend the garden

Rat-stack runs on Effect 4 stable, Alchemy 2 betas, and XState 6 alphas. These lines move often. Code that other projects copy has to stay on the current line and keep getting simpler. This skill is the routine for both.

It follows Lauren Tan's gardener loop from her Dune talk: delete tech debt, keep one paved path, and lint against anti-patterns. In her words: "whenever you see tech debt or bad patterns, your instinct should be, I need to write a lint rule against it." Her ladder for where a correction should live, hardest first, is codebase, static analysis, rules, skills, style guide. This skill sits low on that ladder on purpose. Push each finding up it.

Read AGENTS.md first. Work in a clean clone off origin/main, never in a checkout with other people's uncommitted files.

1. Check the pins

The core pins live in the package.json files and in minimumReleaseAgeExclude in pnpm-workspace.yaml. Compare each against its current line on npm. Run registry queries outside the repo so its development-engine check does not block them:

cd /tmp
for p in effect @effect/platform-node @effect/vitest @effect/tsgo alchemy xstate @xstate/effect; do
  printf '%-24s ' "$p"; pnpm view "$p" dist-tags --json | tr -d '\n '; echo
done