Art & Design

Use when writing or modifying tests, when a test breaks during a refactor, or when testing permission/role rules. Symptoms — tempted to edit a test to make it pass, testing only the happy path, a deny-test that started passing, flaky tests, or unsure what to assert.

Use when changing a database schema where data must survive the change — adding/removing/renaming columns, constraints, indexes, or backfilling. Symptoms — a destructive migration bundled with a code deploy, a NOT NULL column with a backfill, a table-locking UPDATE, or a rename. Keywords — expand/contract, parallel change, backfill, NOT VALID, CREATE INDEX CONCURRENTLY, graphile-migrate.

Use when planning a deploy, designing a rollback, or responding to an incident or writing a postmortem. Keywords — deploy safety, rollback, immutable artifact, progressive delivery, canary, blast radius, incident response, blameless postmortem, error budget.

Use when the user wants to ship work — push, PR, archive decision records, merge, and clean up. Handles the full lifecycle from committing final changes through post-merge cleanup including converting specs/plans to compact decision records.

Use when adding logging, metrics, tracing, health checks, SLOs, or alerting — or when building a service surface that needs to be operable and debuggable. Keywords — structured logs, OpenTelemetry, correlation id, RED metrics, liveness, readiness, SLI, SLO, error budget, alerting.

Use when setting up a new repository with conventional commits, release-please, and CI automation, or when retrofitting an existing repository that lacks automated versioning and PR validation workflows.

Use when working on hot paths, list endpoints, pagination, data-access in loops, or public interfaces/schemas. Symptoms — unbounded queries, N+1 access, no latency budget, optimizing without measuring, or changing an interface many consumers depend on. Keywords — pagination, N+1, Hyrum's Law, performance budget, bundle size.

Use when setting up or changing CI, pre-push hooks, or a task runner, or deciding what must pass before merge. Symptoms — tempted to put authoritative checks only in a local hook, skip CI, bypass with --no-verify, or unsure what gates a merge vs. runs locally.

Use when building or styling UI — components, layouts, forms, design tokens — or making accessibility decisions. Keywords — a11y, WCAG, keyboard navigation, focus state, contrast, design system, minimalist UI, component reuse, ARIA, semantic HTML.

Use when writing PostgreSQL, PostGraphile config, Row-Level Security policies, SQL schema files, or working on the Browser→App→PostGraphile→Postgres data path. Keywords — RLS, SECURITY DEFINER, search_path, pgSettings, grants, roles, GraphQL depth limit, query cost, statement_timeout, SQL file organization.

Use when a design or architecture decision has been made and needs to be captured — writing a decision record or ADR, updating a decision index, noting a deferred idea, or superseding a past decision. Keywords — ADR, decision record, rationale, rejected alternatives, dependency index.

Use when starting a feature, fixing a non-trivial bug, or about to write implementation code — before any code exists. Symptoms you need this: "this is simple, I'll just code it", reaching for the editor before a design is approved, or an idea that hasn't been turned into a spec and plan.

Use when starting work in a project that follows the engineering constitution, orienting to its rules, or deciding which engineering practice applies to a task — spec writing, commits, testing, security, deploys, database, or UI work.

Use when writing a GraphQL query/mutation that the UI and a test will share, or building route/schema contract or smoke tests. Symptoms — copying a query into a test, a test asserting on query text, schema change that didn't break the UI build, or RLS/permission drift. Keywords — graphql-codegen, typed document, contract test, route smoke test.

Use when handling untrusted input, secrets, authentication/authorization, or dependencies — or threat-modeling a new surface. Keywords — STRIDE, threat model, least privilege, secrets management, supply chain, dependency scanning, input validation, audit log, defense in depth.

Use when committing, writing a commit message, opening a PR that will be squash-merged, or configuring automated versioning/changelogs. Keywords — conventional commits, release-please, semver, feat/fix/chore, breaking change, changelog.

Create and scaffold plugin directories for Codex with a required `.codex-plugin/plugin.json`, optional plugin folders/files, valid manifest defaults, and personal-marketplace entries by default. Use when Codex needs to create a new personal plugin, add optional plugin structure, generate or update marketplace entries for plugin ordering and availability metadata, or update an existing local plugin during development with the CLI-driven cachebuster and reinstall flow.

Guide for creating effective skills. This skill should be used when users want to create a new skill (or update an existing skill) that extends Codex's capabilities with specialized knowledge, workflows, or tool integrations.

Use when the user asks how to build with OpenAI products or APIs, asks about Codex itself or choosing Codex surfaces, needs up-to-date official documentation with citations, help choosing the latest model for a use case, latest/current/default-model prompting guidance, or model upgrade and prompt-upgrade guidance; use OpenAI docs MCP tools for non-Codex docs questions, use the Codex manual helper first for broad Codex self-knowledge, and restrict fallback browsing to official OpenAI domains.

Craft-first interface design for dashboards, admin panels, SaaS apps, tools, settings pages, data interfaces, and interactive products. Use when designing, building, reviewing, auditing, or refining product UI where visual craft, layout hierarchy, tokens, states, visual direction, or design-system consistency matter. Not for marketing pages, landing pages, campaigns, or brand-only work.

Use when deploying to Kubernetes or Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), configuring cloud secrets, setting up progressive rollout/canary, per-PR ephemeral environments, or k8s health probes. Keywords — Kubernetes, AKS, Key Vault, Argo Rollouts, Flagger, canary, blue-green, liveness, readiness, PodDisruptionBudget, HPA, rollback, GHCR.

Use when writing or refactoring code, structuring a commit or PR, or deciding whether to abstract duplication. Symptoms — mixing reorg with logic changes, a PR doing several things at once, a file growing large, the second copy of similar code, or unsure whether to DRY something up.

Use when an existing repository has messy commit history that needs to conform to conventional commits before adopting release-please, or when intermediate WIP/fixup/merge commits need to be cleaned up.

Round-based context alignment before execution. Use when the human, project agent, WebGPT, scillm, ask, dogpile, memory, or project-knowledge may each hold different facts about a task; especially before ambiguous design, infographic, product workflow, high-stakes implementation, plan-iterate, project-infographic, or multi-review work.