Skip to content

Add a design skill: guard a deliberate separation with a conformance check instead of collapsing it #147

Description

@missingbulb

Problem

When a design decision would put different things in their right places (separate concerns, split machine-truth from human-prose, keep a pattern's pieces in distinct homes), the fear that those pieces will drift out of sync is often treated as a reason to collapse the design. But drift is guardable: a conformance check that fails on divergence lets you keep the clean separation and the safety.

This design-decision heuristic is only partially present in the corpus today. engineering-practices carries the tactical mechanics — "keep a single source of truth … and have a test fail if it drifts" (line 11), and "point to B, don't paraphrase B" (line 12). What's missing is the higher-altitude decision reframe and one specific nugget:

  • Drift-fear is not a veto on a correct separation — it's a prompt to write the guard.
  • The guard ships in the pack/module that defines the pattern, so enforcement travels with the design decision wherever the pattern is reused.

Decision

Owner chose a new skill (over extending engineering-practices or adding to checks/DESIGN.md) as the home, to seed a place for design-decision judgment to accumulate.

Scope

  • Add skills/design/SKILL.md — the decision heuristic, a short decision sequence, the boundary against "duplicate freely," and one corpus-grounded example (the pack-declaration design: machine-truth in .claudinite-checks.json + hook-rendered prose, both from one declaration, guarded by the fingerprint check).
  • Cross-link engineering-practices for the drift-guard mechanics rather than duplicating them (honors the corpus's own "point to B" rule).
  • Add the catalog row in skills/README.md.
  • No per-skill wiring needed — bootstrap Part 7's structural loop auto-mounts new skill dirs on re-bootstrap.

Not in scope: migrating existing engineering-practices bullets into the new skill (larger, reference-touching change; revisit as follow-up if the design skill grows).

Metadata

Metadata

Assignees

No one assigned

    Labels

    No labels
    No labels

    Projects

    No projects

    Milestone

    No milestone

    Relationships

    None yet

    Development

    No branches or pull requests

    Issue actions