Skill: Developer Onboarding Engineering

Making new team members productive on day one — through code archaeology, automated setup, structured knowledge transfer, and measurable onboarding outcomes.

When to Activate

• A new developer is joining the team and there is no CONTRIBUTING.md or it is outdated
• The time between joining and the first merged PR exceeds two weeks
• Developers frequently ask the same questions about the codebase in Slack
• A legacy codebase has no documentation explaining its architecture or conventions
• Setting up a new repository and planning for future team growth
• Auditing onboarding quality with Time-to-First-PR metrics
• Running /onboard command to generate onboarding artifacts for an existing codebase

Philosophy: Day-1 Productivity

The goal of onboarding engineering is not orientation — it is making someone productive as fast as possible. Measure success with concrete milestones: