Addy Osmani — Agent Skills
Workflow — the primary skill per SDLC stage this framework runs, top to bottom (folded and off-stage steps omitted). Validate and Review are sibling gates that both run after Implement.
flowchart TB A["addy-interview-me<br/><i>Align</i>"] --> S["addy-spec-driven-development<br/><i>Specify</i>"] --> P["addy-planning<br/><i>Plan</i>"] --> I["addy-incremental-implementation<br/><i>Implement</i>"] I --> V["addy-browser-testing<br/><i>Validate</i>"] I --> R["addy-code-review<br/><i>Review</i>"] V --> Rel["addy-shipping<br/><i>Release</i>"] R --> Rel
Production-grade engineering skills for AI coding agents by Addy Osmani — a pack of 24 skills, 4 review personas, and 8 slash commands that encode the workflows and quality gates senior engineers use, organized around the whole product lifecycle. MIT-licensed; distributed as a Claude Code plugin and portable across Cursor, Gemini CLI, Antigravity, OpenCode, Windsurf, Copilot, Kiro, and Codex.
- Install (Claude Code):
/plugin marketplace add addyosmani/agent-skillsthen/plugin install agent-skills@addy-agent-skills. - Design thesis: agents default to the shortest path (skipping specs, tests, security) — skills impose senior-engineering discipline. Bakes in Software Engineering at Google concepts: Hyrum’s Law, the Beyoncé Rule, the test pyramid, change sizing, review-speed norms, Chesterton’s Fence, trunk-based development, Shift Left, code-as-liability.
Where gsd is a single end-to-end workflow engine and matt-pocock-skills is a loose personal toolkit, Agent Skills is a lifecycle-complete, phase-structured pack: slash commands map 1:1 to six phases, a meta-skill (addy-using-agent-skills) routes work to the right skill, and every skill carries an anti-rationalization table and Red Flags (pattern-anti-rationalization). It is the broadest framework in this wiki — the first to give the stage-release stage substantial multi-capability evidence.
Distinctive mechanisms
- Anti-rationalization + Red Flags in every skill — pattern-anti-rationalization tables of excuses agents use to skip steps, each rebutted, plus warning signs.
- Review personas with parallel fan-out — addy-shipping (
/ship) fans out addy-code-reviewer, addy-security-auditor, addy-test-engineer concurrently, then merges a go/no-go (pattern-parallel-persona-review). Personas never invoke personas. - Verification is non-negotiable — every skill ends with evidence requirements (tests passing, build output, runtime data); “seems right” is never sufficient.
- Progressive disclosure —
SKILL.mdis the entry point; reference checklists load only when needed. - Human checkpoint at each phase — commands stop between phases (except
/build auto, which runs the whole plan in one approved pass, still test-driving and committing each task individually).
Lifecycle: phase ↔ command ↔ skill ↔ canonical stage
| Phase | Command | Primary skill(s) | Canonical stage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Define | /spec | addy-interview-me, addy-idea-refine, addy-spec-driven-development | stage-align → stage-specify |
| Plan | /plan | addy-planning | stage-plan |
| Build | /build (/build auto) | addy-incremental-implementation + addy-tdd | stage-implement |
| Verify | /test | addy-tdd, addy-browser-testing, addy-debugging | stage-implement / stage-validate |
| Review | /review, /code-simplify, /webperf | addy-code-review, addy-code-simplification, addy-security, addy-performance | stage-review |
| Ship | /ship | addy-shipping + fan-out personas | stage-release |
Note on Verify vs Review. Addy was the first framework to cleanly separate does it work (Verify — testing, debugging) from is it good (Review — code review, security, performance, simplification). This partition — confirmed by gstack as a second framework (2026-07-05) — promoted stage-review out of stage-validate: Addy’s Review phase (plus its
/shippersona fan-out) implements stage-review; its Verify capability addy-browser-testing stays in stage-validate.
Capabilities
Skills — Define (align → specify)
- addy-interview-me — one-question-at-a-time interview to ~95% confidence in intent.
- addy-idea-refine — divergent/convergent thinking turning vague ideas into proposals.
- addy-spec-driven-development — write a PRD/SPEC.md before any code.
Skills — Plan
- addy-planning — decompose specs into small, verifiable, dependency-ordered tasks.
Skills — Build
- addy-incremental-implementation — thin vertical slices: implement, test, verify, commit.
- addy-tdd — Red-Green-Refactor; test pyramid; Prove-It for bugs.
- addy-context-engineering — feed agents the right context at the right time.
- addy-source-driven-development — ground decisions in cited official documentation.
- addy-doubt-driven-development — adversarial fresh-context review of in-flight decisions.
- addy-frontend-ui — production-quality UI; design systems; WCAG 2.1 AA accessibility.
- addy-api-design — contract-first interfaces; Hyrum’s Law; One-Version Rule.
Skills — Verify
- addy-browser-testing — live runtime data via Chrome DevTools MCP.
- addy-debugging — five-step triage: reproduce, localize, reduce, fix, guard.
Skills — Review
- addy-code-review — five-axis review with severity labels and change sizing.
- addy-code-simplification — reduce complexity while preserving exact behavior.
- addy-security — OWASP Top 10 prevention; auth; secrets; dependency auditing.
- addy-performance — measure-first; Core Web Vitals; profiling; bundle analysis.
Skills — Ship
- addy-git-workflow — trunk-based development; atomic commits; semver; changelogs.
- addy-ci-cd — Shift Left; feature flags; quality-gate pipelines.
- addy-deprecation — code-as-liability; compulsory vs advisory deprecation; zombie-code removal.
- addy-documentation — ADRs, API docs, inline docs — document the why.
- addy-observability — structured logging; RED metrics; OpenTelemetry; symptom-based alerting.
- addy-shipping — pre-launch checklists; staged rollouts; rollback; the
/shipfan-out.
Skills — Meta
- addy-using-agent-skills — routes incoming work to the right skill; shared operating rules.
Agent personas (sub-agents)
- addy-code-reviewer — Senior Staff Engineer; five-axis review before merge.
- addy-test-engineer — QA specialist; test strategy, coverage analysis, Prove-It.
- addy-security-auditor — Security engineer; vulnerability detection, threat modeling, OWASP.
- addy-web-performance-auditor — Web performance engineer; Core Web Vitals; Quick/Deep modes; run via
/webperf.
Commands (thin phase entrypoints, catalogued here)
Each command invokes the skill(s) above and is documented in the phase table; they carry no independent workflow beyond skill activation, so they are not given separate capability pages.
/spec,/plan,/build(+auto),/test,/review,/code-simplify,/webperf,/ship.
Reference checklists (bundled, pulled in on demand)
definition-of-done.md,testing-patterns.md,security-checklist.md,performance-checklist.md,accessibility-checklist.md,observability-checklist.md,orchestration-patterns.md.
Artifacts produced
- artifact-spec-md —
SPEC.mdfrom addy-spec-driven-development (Addy’s counterpart to MP’s artifact-prd). - artifact-plan-md —
tasks/plan.md+tasks/todo.mdfrom addy-planning. - artifact-atomic-commit — one commit per slice, from addy-incremental-implementation / addy-git-workflow.
- artifact-review-report — five-axis review from addy-code-review / addy-code-reviewer.
- artifact-security-audit — from addy-security / addy-security-auditor.
- artifact-perf-audit — Core Web Vitals scorecard from addy-performance / addy-web-performance-auditor.
- artifact-changelog — from addy-git-workflow.
- artifact-adr — from addy-documentation (shared artifact type with MP).
- artifact-launch-checklist — pre-launch checklist + rollback plan from addy-shipping.
Patterns applied
- pattern-anti-rationalization — excuse/rebuttal tables across every skill (Addy’s signature mechanism).
- pattern-adversarial-review — fresh-context doubt loop (addy-doubt-driven-development).
- pattern-source-grounding — cite official docs, flag the unverified (addy-source-driven-development).
- pattern-context-engineering — right context at the right time (addy-context-engineering).
- pattern-contract-first — design the interface before the implementation (addy-api-design).
- pattern-measure-first — profile before optimizing (addy-performance).
- pattern-trunk-based-development — short-lived branches, atomic commits (addy-git-workflow, addy-ci-cd).
- pattern-shift-left — move quality gates earlier (addy-ci-cd).
- pattern-feature-flags — decouple deploy from release (addy-incremental-implementation, addy-ci-cd, addy-shipping).
- pattern-parallel-persona-review — concurrent specialist review fan-out (addy-shipping).
- Shared with other frameworks: pattern-grilling, pattern-spec-driven-development, pattern-vertical-slice, pattern-test-driven-development, pattern-systematic-debugging, pattern-fresh-context-subagents, pattern-deep-modules.
See Also
- gsd — end-to-end workflow engine; Addy’s addy-shipping ↔ gsd-ship, and both share pattern-vertical-slice, pattern-test-driven-development, pattern-grilling, pattern-systematic-debugging, pattern-fresh-context-subagents.
- matt-pocock-skills — personal toolkit; Addy’s docs explicitly compare the two. Shared clusters: addy-interview-me ↔ mp-grill-me, addy-spec-driven-development ↔ mp-to-spec, addy-tdd ↔ mp-tdd, addy-debugging ↔ mp-diagnosing-bugs, addy-api-design ↔ mp-codebase-design.
- Addy’s
docs/comparison.mdmaps agent-skills vs Superpowers (obra) vs Matt Pocock — the three share DNA; agent-skills optimizes for broad disciplined validation across the full lifecycle, Superpowers for heavy upfront reasoning + autonomy, MP for a sharp daily loop. Superpowers is a candidate fourth-framework ingest. - openspec — spec-first framework; addy-spec-driven-development ↔ openspec-propose in the stage-specify cluster (both write the spec before code), addy-incremental-implementation ↔ openspec-apply, addy-shipping ↔ openspec-archive. Addy covers the release/ops surface (CI/CD, observability, deprecation) OpenSpec omits; OpenSpec contributes the pattern-living-specification Addy lacks.
- bmad — the other breadth leader; both use named review/role personas and fresh-context subagents. Shared clusters: addy-spec-driven-development ↔ bmad-prd, addy-incremental-implementation ↔ bmad-dev-story, addy-code-review ↔ bmad-code-review, and Addy’s pattern-parallel-persona-review
/shipfan-out ↔ BMAD’s Party-Mode / code-review layers. Addy carries release/ops; BMAD carries the deeper analysis/planning front-end and the pattern-persona-agents cast. - compound-engineering — Every’s compounding loop; the closest peer on breadth. Direct clusters: addy-code-simplification ↔ ce-simplify-code, addy-code-review ↔ ce-code-review, addy-performance ↔ ce-optimize, addy-browser-testing ↔ ce-test-browser/ce-dogfood, addy-debugging ↔ ce-debug, addy-git-workflow ↔ ce-commit, addy-shipping ↔ ce-commit-push-pr; both apply pattern-parallel-persona-review. CE contributes the stage-learn stage Addy folds away.
- stage-align · stage-specify · stage-plan · stage-implement · stage-validate · stage-review · stage-release — the canonical-stage projections this framework’s capabilities feed (its Verify∥Review split promoted stage-review).