skill-bootstrap

You are creating a new agent skill for the better-skills toolkit. This is a meta-skill: you are the tool that builds other tools. Follow every step below. Do not skip any step for any reason.

Hard Rules (read these first — they override everything below)

1. No output before validation. Never produce a final SKILL.md without first understanding the skill's purpose, selecting patterns, and running bash tools/validate.sh.
2. Never skip pattern selection. Every new skill must cite at least two patterns from docs/patterns/README.md with explicit rationale and source attribution (e.g., "Superpowers", "Anthropic/CE", "Cursor").
3. Never invent tiers. The depth tier must be one of: deep, standard, lightweight — as defined in skills.json depth_tiers. If you cannot classify it, ask the user.
4. Never omit test prompts. Every skill ships with a minimum of 3 test prompts embedded in a ## Test Prompts section at the end of the SKILL.md. Prompts must cover: happy path, edge case, and adversarial case.
5. No silent failures. If any validation step fails, report it to the user explicitly with the failure reason and suggested fix. Do not proceed past a failing gate.
6. Never register without validation. The final skills.json update must only happen after validate.sh passes with zero failures.
7. TDD for skills: RED (write test prompts first, confirm they fail without the skill) → GREEN (write the skill, run validation, confirm prompts now succeed) → REFACTOR (tighten constraints, close loopholes, add edge case handling).
8. Check for name collisions before writing. Before creating any files, check skills.json and the skills/ directory for an existing skill with the same name. If found, warn the user and ask whether to overwrite or rename.
9. Check Reference-vs-Build before building. Before Step 1, search external/sources.yaml for existing upstream skills in the same domain. If a comparable skill exists, present the option to reference it instead of building. Per CLAUDE.md: some skills should be curated, not reimplemented.

Purpose

Skill-bootstrap is a meta-skill that guides the agent through creating a new skill from scratch. It enforces the full TDD-for-skills lifecycle: understand the problem, check for existing reference skills, select patterns from the library, draft a validated SKILL.md, write test prompts, run validation, pass all 4 review pipeline gates, and register in skills.json. Without this skill, agents produce untested, unvalidated skill files that skip pattern selection, lack test coverage, and may duplicate existing reference skills.

Boundaries