Pragmatic Programmer skill
The Pragmatic Programmer by Andy Hunt and Dave Thomas is one of my favourite books. I wanted its principles in every software project I work on, so I turned them into a skill: operational guidance that an AI coding agent follows while it builds. I use it on my own projects, and anyone can install it in theirs.
The goal isn’t an agent that quotes philosophy. It’s an agent that behaves like a pragmatic engineer:
- Inspect before assuming: read the code, config and errors first.
- Preserve before replacing: make surgical edits, not rewrites.
- Prefer small, reversible changes and existing conventions.
- Fix root causes, not symptoms.
- Control scope: no “cleanup” the task didn’t ask for.
- Verify before claiming success: run the tests, the build and the product.
The repository includes a benchmark comparing agents with and without the skill on backend and full-stack tasks, covering dependencies added, size of fixes, backwards compatibility, security and accessibility, with the full method and diffs published alongside.