Adversarial pre-merge code review — drive /code-review, then run the three passes diff-reading skips (reproduce the load-bearing claim, trace every consumer, review against the whole repo) and the bug-class rubric that catches reachable destructive ops, unmirrored parallel-path guards, migration crashes, and dead features that still pass CI. Use before merging a substantive change, when asked to "review like Ben's robot", "hunt edge cases", "break this before merge", "is this actually mergeable", or to give a self-authored change an independent pass. Reads optional per-repo hints from the `## elenchus` section of `.claude/skill-context.md`.
Check a documentation file for drift against the actual codebase — CLI commands, file paths, config keys, function signatures, version numbers, environment variables — and propose corrections. Use when the user wants to audit README.md, docs/*.md, or similar for claims that no longer match reality. Drift usually comes from refactors that forgot to update the docs.
Use when a draft research paper needs a pre-submission novelty and reviewer pass — whether its contributions are actually new, what related work it misses, whether its claims hold up, and whether it overlaps a lab or co-author line that must be disclosed. Triggers include "review my paper for novelty", "is this contribution novel", "novelty check before submitting", "what related work am I missing", "verify my citations are real", "paper-review <name>".
Use when starting or scaffolding a new research paper in a papers-style monorepo (a repo of LaTeX paper directories that share one bibliography). Triggers include "scaffold a paper", "start a new paper", "set up a paper dir", "new paper from <repo>", "add a paper to papers/".
Cross-repo drift audit across linked repos listed in `~/.claude/techne.toml` (configurable per-user). Read-only inspection of CI action pins, toolchain pins in pyproject.toml, skill-context structural parity, GitHub merge settings, open PRs, and branch hygiene. Triggers on phrases like "audit the sisters", "are the sisters in sync", "check cross-repo drift", or when multiple sister repos are mentioned together for a consistency check.
Audit a plan's design decisions — library, framework, pattern, and architecture choices in IMPL.md / ROADMAP.md — for missing `# research(YYYY-MM):` provenance, then web-search to ground them. Use when you want architectural choices verified against current best practice before they harden into code, rather than resting on training-cutoff recall. Catches committed decisions stated as fact but never checked — the class of miss that becomes revertable work.
Scan the codebase for AI-generated slop in comments and docstrings — temporal markers, self-referential AI framing, narrative WHAT-comments, marketing padding — and propose tightened rewrites, routing claim-bearing docstrings that need a code-grounded rewrite to its sibling /techne:reslop. Use when the user wants to audit pending changes or the whole codebase for verbose, low-value commentary left by other assistants (Copilot, Gemini, GPT, etc.).
Rewrite docstrings and comments by reading the actual implementation, call sites, and tests — produce grounded, factual prose instead of deleting slop. Sibling of /techne:deslop. Use when the user wants to replace overhyped or hallucinated documentation with accurate one- or two-line descriptions derived from what the code actually does.