thoughtbot

Think out loud about a problem, decision, or approach — Socratic friction to help you find clarity, not sympathy

Socratic code review and refactoring session — whether it's your own code, a teammate's PR, or something you inherited. Leads you to see the issues through questions, names smells and moves precisely, then closes with a concrete plan.

Turn a feature into well-defined, independently shippable slices — whether it's an epic that needs breaking apart or a single story that needs sharpening into a job story

Walk through the Designer/Developer wrap-up checklist for offboarding a client engagement — conversationally, one item at a time.

Explain what a piece of code does — a specific file, class, or method in close detail, or a user-facing flow as a concise system overview. What it does and why, not whether it's good.

Pressure-test an assumption, decision, or inherited constraint — Socratic cross-examination that forces you to defend or abandon your position

Strict red-green-refactor TDD workflow for implementing features, fixing bugs, or changing behavior in Rails applications. Enforces the discipline of writing a failing test before any production code. Use whenever you want to implement with TDD — whether a new feature, a bugfix, a refactor, or any behavior change.

Discover how a codebase already handles a specific concern — search broadly, find every instance, and assess consistency. The "how does this app do X?" tool.

Perform comprehensive code audits of Ruby on Rails applications based on thoughtbot best practices. Use this skill when the user requests a code audit, code review, quality assessment, or analysis of a Rails application. The skill analyzes the entire codebase focusing on testing practices (RSpec), security vulnerabilities, code design (skinny controllers, domain models, PORO with ActiveModel), Rails conventions, database optimization, and Ruby best practices. Outputs a detailed markdown audit report grouped by category (Testing, Security, Models, Controllers, Code Design, Views) with severity levels (Critical, High, Medium, Low) within each category.

Use when refactoring code or when asked to refactor. Provides a 6-gate decision framework to determine whether refactoring is appropriate and when to stop.

Use when writing or reviewing tests in a Ruby/Rails application. Guides agents to write well-structured tests using the Arrange/Act/Assert pattern, semantic Capybara selectors, and performance-aware practices.

Use when encountering bugs, test failures, or unexpected behavior. Provides a systematic debugging process based on surfacing assumptions, building decision tables, and validating one assumption at a time.

Use when writing or modifying code in a Rails application. Guides agents to follow thoughtbot best practices for N+1 prevention, view layer organization, and domain modeling.

Perform comprehensive code audits of Ruby on Rails applications based on thoughtbot best practices. Use this skill when the user requests a code audit, code review, quality assessment, or analysis of a Rails application. The skill analyzes the entire codebase focusing on testing practices (RSpec), security vulnerabilities, code design (skinny controllers, domain models, PORO with ActiveModel), Rails conventions, database optimization, and Ruby best practices. Outputs a detailed markdown audit report grouped by category (Testing, Security, Models, Controllers, Code Design, Views) with severity levels (Critical, High, Medium, Low) within each category.

Systematically eliminate unexpected output (warnings, stray puts/logs, deprecation notices) from a Ruby on Rails RSpec test suite, one issue at a time, with per-fix verification and commits. Use this skill whenever the user wants to clean up, silence, fix, or investigate noisy output from `bundle exec rspec`, mentions warnings or stray logs appearing during test runs, or asks to get their RSpec suite running "clean". Also use when a user says things like "my test output is noisy", "there's a bunch of warnings when I run specs", or "help me clean up the RSpec output" - even if they don't explicitly name this skill.

Use when implementing features, fixing bugs, refactoring code, or making any multi-step code changes. Guides agents to commit early and often in atomic increments, separate feature/refactor/cleanup work, and keep pull requests under ~200 lines. Use whenever writing code that will be committed, even if the user doesn't mention commits or PRs.