State-of-the-art documentation and engineering-collaboration guidance (2026) covering documentation architecture (Diátaxis, docs-as-code, READMEs, runbooks, onboarding, AI-readable docs), API/reference docs and changelogs, and the team workflow around code: pull requests, code review conduct, commit discipline, branching, and releases. Use when writing or structuring any documentation AND when auditing docs quality, and when designing or auditing collaboration workflow. Not for in-product UI microcopy (use sota-ux-writing) or marketing/landing-page copy (use sota-copywriting). Trigger keywords: documentation, docs, README, API docs, docstring, changelog, release notes, migration guide, code review, pull request, PR description, commit messages, conventional commits, branching, semver, onboarding, runbook, AGENTS.md, llms.txt, spec-driven development, SDD, Spec Kit, Kiro, specification, acceptance criteria, steering files.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art API design and audit guidance (2026) covering REST/HTTP, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets/SSE/realtime, webhooks, versioning/evolution, and API security/operations. Use when designing or building any API surface (endpoints, schemas, protos, realtime channels, webhook senders/receivers) AND when auditing/reviewing existing APIs for correctness, evolvability, security, and operational robustness. Not for browser UI, rendering, or client-framework concerns — use sota-web-frameworks or sota-frontend-design. Trigger keywords: API, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, endpoint, websocket, SSE, realtime, WebRTC, webhook, versioning, OpenAPI, pagination, idempotency, rate limit, problem+json, protobuf, deprecation.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art rules for writing and auditing asynchronous and concurrent code across runtimes (Python asyncio, JS/Node, Go, Rust, JVM). Use when building anything with async/await, threads, processes, event loops, task groups, channels, or queues — and when auditing existing code for race conditions, deadlocks, leaked tasks, blocked event loops, missing cancellation, or backpressure failures. Not for latency/throughput profiling and optimization — use sota-performance. Trigger keywords: async, await, concurrency, parallelism, threads, race condition, deadlock, event loop, channels, queues, semaphore, mutex, cancellation, timeout, backpressure, task group, goroutine, tokio, asyncio.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art CLI and developer-tool UX guidance (2026) covering command and flag design, output and interaction (stdout/stderr, --json, TTY detection, exit codes, prompts), runtime behavior and lifecycle (signals, dry-run, idempotency, XDG paths, completions, telemetry), and distribution (packaging, checksums, docs). Use when designing or building any command line tool, subcommand, TUI, or developer tool — in any framework (argparse, click, typer, clap, cobra, oclif, commander) — AND when auditing an existing CLI for usability, scriptability, and compatibility. Not for shell-script correctness or security — use sota-shell-scripting. Trigger keywords: CLI, command line tool, flags, subcommands, terminal output, TUI, developer tool, argparse, clap, cobra, exit code, shell completion, man page, stdin, stdout.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art database engineering rules (2026) for designing, building, and auditing data layers. Covers engine selection, schema modeling, migrations, query and index craft, transactions and concurrency, reliability and scale, security, and vector/AI workloads. Use when designing a new data layer, writing or reviewing schemas/migrations/queries, debugging slow or contended database workloads, or auditing an existing database for correctness, performance, and security. Not for ETL or streaming data pipelines — use sota-data-engineering. Trigger keywords: database, SQL, Postgres, schema, migration, index, query, ORM, transaction, NoSQL, Redis, vector DB, pgvector, replication, partitioning, connection pool, RLS, EXPLAIN, deadlock, sharding, caching, SurrealDB, SurrealQL, Qdrant, multi-model, graph database.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art DevSecOps and software supply chain security (2026). Applies when building or auditing CI/CD pipelines, GitHub Actions workflows, supply chain controls, SBOM generation, SAST/secret-scanning gates, dependency management, container builds, container/artifact registries, IaC (Terraform), GitOps, and deployment strategy. Trigger keywords: CI/CD, pipeline, GitHub Actions, supply chain, SBOM, SAST, dependency, container build, container registry, registry security, Zot, Harbor, ECR, GAR, ACR, GHCR, immutable tags, pull-through cache, IaC, Terraform, deployment, provenance, SLSA, cosign, dependabot, renovate. Use for BOTH setting up new pipelines and auditing existing ones. Not for application code vulnerabilities (use sota-code-security) or in-cluster runtime hardening (use sota-kubernetes).
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art observability and reliability engineering (2026). Use when instrumenting code (structured logging, metrics, distributed tracing with OpenTelemetry, SLOs, alerting, health endpoints) or auditing an existing codebase's observability posture (can on-call answer "why is this request slow?" and "what broke at 3am?"). Not for security detections, SIEM, or threat hunting — use sota-detection-engineering. Triggers: logging, metrics, tracing, monitoring, alerting, SLO, SLI, error budget, OpenTelemetry, OTel, Prometheus, Grafana, debugging production, incident, on-call, telemetry, instrumentation, health check, runbook, Sentry, crash reporting, profiling.
2026-07-16
State-of-the-art performance engineering for building fast systems and auditing existing code for bottlenecks. Use when the task involves performance, optimization, latency, profiling, slow code, memory usage, caching, or throughput — designing latency budgets, fixing N+1 and accidental-quadratic patterns, tuning allocation/GC pressure, network and I/O efficiency, cache architecture, Core Web Vitals, or setting up benchmarks and regression gates. Not for concurrency correctness (races, deadlocks, cancellation) — use sota-async-concurrency. Trigger keywords: performance, optimization, latency, profiling, slow, memory usage, caching, throughput, bottleneck, p99, flamegraph, Core Web Vitals.
2026-07-16
