docs: add human-facing pages for the remaining 22 promoted skills

Adds a docs page for every promoted skill that lacked one, following
.agents/writing-docs.md and using docs/engineering/to-prd.md as the
worked exemplar. Covers all of engineering/ (bar to-prd, already done),
productivity/, and misc/.

Each page states its load-bearing constraint, its invocation mode and
trigger boundary, surfaces the skill's leading word, and routes back to
ask-matt so the set forms a connected router with no dead ends.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 4.8 <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock 2026-07-01 11:18:17 +01:00
parent 5694f83609
commit f5ed5657bd
22 changed files with 888 additions and 0 deletions

View file

@ -0,0 +1,40 @@
Quickstart:
```bash
npx skills add mattpocock/skills --skill=prototype
```
```bash
npx skills update prototype
```
[Source](https://github.com/mattpocock/skills/tree/main/skills/engineering/prototype)
## What it does
`prototype` builds a small, disposable program whose only job is to answer one design question — does this state model feel right, or what should this UI look like.
The load-bearing constraint: the code is **throwaway from day one**, and marked as such. It carries no tests, no error handling beyond what makes it run, no abstractions, and no persistence. The point is to learn something fast and then delete it — so the moment you start hardening it, you've stopped prototyping.
## When to reach for it
Type `/prototype`, or the agent reaches for it automatically when a task fits.
Reach for it when you have a design question that's hard to settle on paper — a state machine with cases you can't hold in your head, or a screen you can't picture until you see a few versions side by side. If instead something already built is misbehaving and you need to find out why, use [diagnosing-bugs](https://aihero.dev/skills-diagnosing-bugs); prototyping explores what to build, not why the built thing is broken.
## Two branches
The question decides the shape, and there are two shapes:
- **"Does this logic / state model feel right?"** — a tiny interactive terminal app that pushes the state machine through the awkward cases, printing the full state after every action so you can watch what changes.
- **"What should this look like?"** — several radically different UI variations on one route, switchable from a floating bar, so you compare real renders instead of imagining them.
Picking the wrong branch wastes the whole prototype, so the question comes first. Both branches keep state in memory, run from one command, and surface the full state on every step.
## The answer is the artifact
The code is disposable; the **answer** is the only thing worth keeping. When the prototype has settled its question, capture the verdict somewhere durable — a commit message, an ADR, an issue, or a `NOTES.md` next to it — alongside the question it answered, then delete or absorb the code. A prototype left rotting in the repo has outlived its purpose.
## Where it fits
`prototype` is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone: you drop into it to resolve a design question, then drop back out. Its answer often feeds the next step — a validated state model or UI direction becomes settled input for [to-prd](https://aihero.dev/skills-to-prd) to write up, or an architectural decision worth recording via [domain-modeling](https://aihero.dev/skills-domain-modeling). When you're unsure which skill or flow fits, [ask-matt](https://aihero.dev/skills-ask-matt) routes you.