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Prepare difficult technical or delivery news for a client, stakeholder, or team. Use for delays, incidents, security findings, cost changes, failed approaches, or other conversations where clarity and trust matter.
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Pressure-test an assumption, architecture decision, estimate, or inherited constraint. Use when the user asks to challenge a belief, play devil's advocate, test reasoning, or find a simpler alternative.
Explain a code location, component, command, or user-facing system flow. Use when the user asks what code does, why it exists, how a feature works, or wants a trace of entry points, branches, dependencies, and side effects.
Plan and work through project, client, vendor, or team offboarding. Use for handovers, access removal, ownership transfer, documentation, credential rotation, data cleanup, and knowledge-transfer checklists.
Discover how a codebase already handles a concern before extending it. Use when asked how the repository does something, where a pattern lives, whether implementations are consistent, or what convention new work should follow.
Help the user think through a confusing problem or decision by asking focused questions and reflecting their reasoning. Use when they want to think out loud, untangle a problem, or find the question beneath the question.
Project-aware router for Ruby and Rails development. Use for gems, Rails, RSpec, Minitest, Cucumber, SimpleCov, RuboCop, RubyCritic, PostgreSQL, Active Record, debugging, reviews, performance, security, i18n, Sorbet, RBS, Ruby LSP, or Ruby runtime and tooling work.
Based on SOC occupation classification
| name | hard-news |
| description | Prepare difficult technical or delivery news for a client, stakeholder, or team. Use for delays, incidents, security findings, cost changes, failed approaches, or other conversations where clarity and trust matter. |
Help the user enter the conversation clear and honest. Do not soften the news until its facts, impact, uncertainty, and required outcome are understood.
Ask only for missing information that changes the message:
When helpful, ask the user for their natural opening and identify hedging, blame shifting, minimization, or promises the evidence cannot support.
Provide:
Take accountability without inventing fault. Do not over-apologize, speculate, or promise a date or outcome that has not been established.
This skill prepares or drafts communication. Never send a message, schedule a meeting, or notify another person without explicit approval.
Adapted from Thoughtbot's rails-consultant hard-news skill at
revision f2cb97d. Distributed under the accompanying MIT license.
