jrichlen

by Jordan Richlen

Compile deterministic, content-hashed agents from small behavior modules: a skill turns fuzzy intent into a typed AgentQuery, a stdlib-only kernel resolves modules, expands dependencies, fails closed on conflicts and over-ceiling effects, and emits an immutable AgentImage plus a rendered harness-native subagent — never inventing behavior text without provenance.

by Jordan Richlen

Before writing a new interface (module boundary, class API, function signature, or service contract) that at least two call sites will depend on, that crosses a module/service/team/persistence boundary, or that will be expensive to change later — produce 3+ radically different candidate designs and compare them on depth, locality, and seam placement before picking one. Use on "before committing to an interface", "design this API/module/class boundary", "how should this be structured", "compare interface designs", "is this the right abstraction", "design it twice", reviewing a proposed interface shape in a PR — or self-trigger whenever about to write a new interface meeting that bar.

by Jordan Richlen

Walk the ordered continue, clear, handoff, delegate, compact decision tree at a phase boundary, and keep any handoff artifact pointer-only — settled specs, plans, ADRs, issues, commits, and diffs referenced by path or URL, never copied inline. Use this when the context window is getting full, you're wondering whether to clear or compact, you need to hand off to another harness, directory, or colleague, you've hit a phase boundary and aren't sure whether to keep going or start fresh, or you want to cache hard-won research before it's lost.

by Jordan Richlen

Keep a scannable developer journal that writes itself: discover a day's work from local Claude Code sessions, git commits, and prompt history; interview the user about what mattered and why; and record a tight, dated entry. Ships /dev-diary (write today) and /dev-diary-review (revise a past day). The journal is a separate private repo; this plugin is just the tool.

by Jordan Richlen

Diagnose a bug by writing ranked, falsifiable hypotheses before any code change, tagging temporary debug instrumentation for a zero-tolerance sweep, and gating the regression test to a red-then-green proof at the confirmed seam. Use when fixing a bug, debugging a failure, triaging an error, or the user asks to diagnose/root-cause/troubleshoot an issue.

by Jordan Richlen

Audits CLAUDE.md/AGENTS.md/SKILL.md instruction files against current repo state, catches claims that have gone stale (a renamed path, a dropped command, a policy that changed) before they get trusted or acted on, and resolves contradictions between layered instruction files (root vs nested, SKILL.md vs its parent AGENTS.md) down to one explicit kept version instead of leaving both to stand. Use before trusting or propagating any instruction-file claim you haven't personally re-checked, whenever onboarding a repo's docs for the first time, right after a refactor/rename/policy change that could invalidate what's documented, or whenever two instruction files (or an instruction file and the actual repo) say different things about the same fact. Trigger phrases: 'audit the docs', 'is AGENTS.md still accurate', 'clean up CLAUDE.md', 'these instructions contradict each other', 'refactor the AGENTS.md files'.

by Jordan Richlen

Before any call that transmits repo or user content off-machine (posting a comment, pushing a branch, calling an external API with file contents in the payload), state what is being sent and to whom — permission modes gate the call, this gates the content. Use whenever output leaves the machine to a destination the user didn't name in this task.

by Jordan Richlen

Design and audit an agent system's eval ladder — the cheapest rung that catches each regression, the blind spot beside every green, judges validated by TPR/TNR, pass^k for irreversible actions. Use when designing, auditing, or defending a test/eval strategy for an agent, skill, or prompt; when adding an eval tier or LLM judge; or when a suite is all-green and you cannot say what it would catch.

by Jordan Richlen

Search for the existing implementation before writing a new one: name the searches you ran for an existing helper, abstraction, or pattern and what they returned, before introducing anything new. Use before adding a utility, wrapper, config knob, or dependency to a codebase you did not write end-to-end.

by Jordan Richlen

Deploy daily GitHub automation that curates a living, self-invalidating operating index (a 'fleet playbook') for a glob of repos — always pointing at the repos as the source of truth, never posing as it.

by Jordan Richlen

Archive old GitHub repositories into a single private graveyard repo as restorable git bundles, then safely delete the originals. Captures full history (branches, tags, PR refs) and never deletes an original until its backup is verified.

by Jordan Richlen

Interview the user about a plan before work starts, single-session and no subagents required, walking its design tree and scaling question depth to each branch's stakes (reversibility x blast radius) while offering a recommendation at almost every step. Use on phrases like grill me, interview me about this plan, stress-test this plan, or before starting a nontrivial multi-step change whose design isn't yet settled.

by Jordan Richlen

Two reusable multi-agent orchestration templates for research-and-verify work on Claude Code's Workflow tool: fan out research over dimensions, then adversarially verify the claims that research surfaces so plausible-but-wrong findings don't survive. Ships a shared skill, two workflow-script templates (derived-verify, pipelined-verdict-wins), and a worked example.

by Jordan Richlen

Scaffold a new marketplace plugin skeleton in one command: a deterministic generator emits a valid plugin.json, an invariant-first SKILL.md, cross-harness AGENTS.md symlinks, a command stub, and a red-by-default eval that fails closed until you implement real checks — then wires it into the marketplace lockfile.

by Jordan Richlen

Rehearse the rollback before any irreversible action: name the specific restore path and demonstrate it works — never proceed on the strength of 'a backup exists'. Use before deletes, drops, force-pushes, migrations, or any action semver-gate classifies as MAJOR.

by Jordan Richlen

Close the growth loop's DETECT step: read the exhaust every run already sheds — stop-reports, scope-fence findings, unmet criteria, diary entries — cluster it by failure shape, and surface any shape seen at least N times as a named candidate invariant with its sightings cited. Proposes; never scaffolds. Use when asking what keeps going wrong, or before adding a skill on a hunch.

by Jordan Richlen

Working harness for nontrivial work that needs explicit falsifiable criteria, verified ARM/TRACE/JUDGE rounds, or classified human gates. Compose around the most-specific specialist skill or recipe; Redgate reinforces execution and verification rather than replacing the domain procedure.

by Jordan Richlen

A minimal known-good plugin: the calibration baseline the counterfeit corpus mutates.

by Jordan Richlen

Keep every hunk of the diff traceable to the stated task: anything discovered outside scope is recorded as a finding (ticket, note, diary entry) — never fixed in the same change. Use when starting any bounded task, when tempted to 'fix it while I'm here', or when reviewing whether a diff crept beyond its mandate.

by Jordan Richlen

Classify a candidate action as PATCH/MINOR/MAJOR (semver-style blast-radius test) before acting — act silently on PATCH, flag-and-stage MINOR, stop for explicit human sign-off on MAJOR. Use whenever you're mid-task and unsure how much autonomy to take on the next action: which of several implementation paths to pick, whether to overwrite unreviewed state, whether to disable a safety toggle, or any judgment call settings.json's autoMode patterns don't enumerate.

by Jordan Richlen

A halting discipline for iterative fix loops: after a bounded number of failed attempts at the same objective, stop and report the state with hypotheses — never make attempt N+1 on momentum. Use when re-pushing to fix CI, retrying a flaky repro, or any loop where each retry is a guess rather than a diagnosis.

by Jordan Richlen

Set up and troubleshoot secretless GitHub Actions -> Tailscale auth via Workload Identity Federation (WIF): GitHub OIDC exchanged for short-lived Tailscale tokens, with no stored API keys or OAuth secrets.

by Jordan Richlen

Ship the thinnest end-to-end slice through a system first, then widen it in place — for both software delivery and open-ended investigation/research. Use when scoping new work, de-risking unknowns, or planning how to explore an unfamiliar problem before committing to a full build.

by Jordan Richlen

Never assert a fact, completion, or reproduction claim without naming and running the specific check that would prove it false, first.