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mason-skills

A collection of Cursor Agent Skills shared for the tech community.

Skills are reusable instruction sets that teach AI agents how to perform specialized workflows — code review, documentation, automation, and more.

What's inside

Skills live under common-skills/. Each skill is a directory with a required SKILL.md file.

common-skills/
├── ask-oracle/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── article-polish/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── article-workflow/
│   ├── README.md
│   ├── brief/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── clean-sources/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── section-review/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── evidence-pool/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── ai-edit-pass/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── global-review/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── main-draft/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── visual-plan/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── style-bible/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── polish/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── final-review/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   ├── publish/
│   │   └── SKILL.md
│   └── skill-maker/
│       └── SKILL.md
├── distill/
│   └── SKILL.md
├── mermaid-lint/
│   ├── SKILL.md
│   ├── validate-mermaid.py    # Extracts mermaid blocks, drives the worker
│   └── mermaid-worker.mjs     # Renders every block in one browser session
├── open-source-contribution/
│   └── SKILL.md
└── tech-doc-html/
    ├── SKILL.md
    ├── references/       # Design system, component templates, security rules
    ├── scripts/          # Validation helpers
    └── assets/           # Example output

See common-skills/README.md for authoring guidelines.

Usage

Cursor IDE

  1. Clone this repository or copy the skill directory you need.
  2. Place skills in one of these locations:
    • Personal~/.cursor/skills/<skill-name>/ (available across all projects)
    • Project.cursor/skills/<skill-name>/ (shared with the repository)
  3. Cursor discovers skills automatically from the SKILL.md frontmatter.

For the article-workflow group, copy the entire directory:

~/.cursor/skills/article-workflow/

Other agents

Skills are plain markdown. You can adapt the instructions for other AI coding tools that support custom system prompts or skill files.

Available skills

Skill Description
ask-oracle Produces a concise brief containing the original request and all decision-relevant context, reserving technical judgment for an expert oracle.
article-polish Article polishing with quick / normal / refined modes. Derivative work based on baoyu-translate.
article-workflow A phased article optimization workflow with 13 skills — from brief generation through final publication. See workflow README for phase order and usage.
distill Reviews agent sessions for evidence-backed harness improvements, pruning stale or conflicting rules before strengthening specs, tools, checks, skills, or CI.
mermaid-lint Validates and fixes mermaid diagrams in markdown. Renders every block against the real mermaid renderer and reports all failures in one pass. Original skill design.
open-source-contribution Open-source contribution hygiene: privacy scanning, Git history cleanup, installer hardening, autoreview, and safe push/PR validation.
tech-doc-html Interactive single-file HTML from technical design docs. Original skill design; visual style inspired by html-effectiveness.

ask-oracle

A manually invoked skill that frames the user's request and all known decision-changing context, then asks an expert oracle to supply the technical judgment.

article-polish

Polishes and improves writing with three modes (quick / normal / refined). Supports style presets, audience tuning, long-document chunking, and persistent preferences via EXTEND.md.

article-workflow

A phased article optimization workflow. Each skill handles one phase — from brief generation through final publication. Skills are designed to be used in sequence, but each can also be invoked independently. See the workflow README for details.

Recommended order:

Phase Skill Purpose
0 article-workflow-brief Generate an editorial brief
0.5 article-workflow-clean-sources Clean oral draft transcription errors
1 article-workflow-section-review Section-by-section narrative review
2 article-workflow-evidence-pool Fact-checking and material pool
3 (Author self-read and direct editing) Author directly edits .article-workflow/00-cleaned-sources/
3.5 article-workflow-ai-edit-pass AI-assisted editing based on confirmed decisions
4 article-workflow-global-review Whole-article coherence review
4.5 article-workflow-main-draft Integrate sections into a continuous draft
4.6 article-workflow-visual-plan Illustration and visual aid planning
5.0 article-workflow-style-bible Extract a style bible
5 article-workflow-polish Multi-round polishing
6 article-workflow-final-review Final review and reader testing
8 article-workflow-publish Sync to publishing channels

The article-workflow-skill-maker is a meta skill for turning a manually executed phase into a reusable workflow skill.

distill

Replays the current session as a Harness Engineering retrospective, including failures, successful shortcuts, and interaction friction. Before adding guidance, it audits existing rules for staleness, duplication, conflicts, deterministic replacements, and misplaced scope. It then proposes at most five changes across specs, context, skills, tools, environment, tests, lint, pre-commit, CI, and evals behind one compact approval gate.

mermaid-lint

Finds every mermaid diagram in one or more markdown files, validates it, and fixes the broken ones. Unlike the other skills here it ships executable helpers, so it needs Node.js and @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli available on PATH; the skill will not install them for you.

Two design decisions are worth calling out, because the obvious alternatives are worse:

  • It renders each diagram instead of only parsing it. mermaid.parse() covers the parse phase only, so errors raised while rendering slip through — an invalid gantt date such as notadate parses fine but fails to render. Rendering answers the question a document author actually has: will this diagram show up?
  • It renders the whole batch in a single browser session. Spawning one Chromium per diagram costs roughly 1.7s each; sharing a session brings the marginal cost down to about 12ms, so 60 diagrams take ~2s instead of ~100s. Running mmdc over the markdown file directly would also share a session, but it aborts on the first bad diagram, which defeats the point of a linter.

Block extraction follows CommonMark fence rules. A deliberately broken example nested inside a longer fence is not reported as a real error, and directive-style blocks, fences carrying an info string, and tilde fences are all recognized.

open-source-contribution

Standardizes open-source contribution cleanup and release checks for coding agents: scan file content and Git metadata, remove local paths and private identities, harden installers, preserve streaming behavior in local proxies, run gitleaks/pre-commit/tests, use autoreview as a closeout gate, and verify history rewrites before pushing.

tech-doc-html

An original Cursor skill that converts technical specs into interactive HTML visualizations. The agent picks components per section (Mermaid diagrams, SVG sliders, comparison tables, risk matrices), runs Mermaid security checks and Playwright QA, and applies a visual style inspired by html-effectiveness.

Triggers: generate technical design HTML, architecture diagram pages, interactive RFC visualizations.

Includes: design system reference, component pattern library, example output, security validation scripts.

Contributing

This is a personal skills collection. Feel free to fork, adapt, and use the skills under the MIT License.

If you find a bug or have a suggestion, open an issue or pull request.

License

This repository is released under the MIT License.

Attributions

Derivative work based on baoyu-translate from baoyu-skills (MIT, Copyright Jim Liu). Repurposes the workflow for writing improvement. Independent project.

Original skill designs for a phased article optimization workflow. Each skill covers one phase — from brief generation through publication. The visual planning phase references a generic article-illustrator skill for prompt construction rules.

Original skill design. Drives mermaid through @mermaid-js/mermaid-cli (MIT) at runtime; neither project's code is vendored here.

Original Cursor skill design. Visual style inspired by html-effectiveness (Apache-2.0, Copyright Anthropic PBC). Style patterns used in references/design_system.md and references/component_patterns.md. Full Apache-2.0 text.

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