advise-project-approach

AI agents should not give project advice from vibes.

advise-project-approach is a Claude/Codex skill for project planning, course correction, and review.

Before recommending a stack, architecture, vendor, refactor, or shipping plan, it checks:

your actual constraints
comparable real-world projects
tradeoffs and failure conditions
cost and lock-in realities
when the recommendation becomes wrong

Use It When

you have a rough project idea and need a build plan
your repo is getting messy and you need course correction
you are choosing between stacks or vendors
you want a review before shipping
you want the agent to explain what not to build yet

One-Line Install

npx skills@latest add AaravKashyap12/advise-project-approach --skill advise-project-approach

This uses the open skills installer to fetch the repo from GitHub and install only this skill. It requires Node.js/npm. Review installed skills before use; skills run with your agent's normal permissions.

Source of Truth

The runtime skill spec lives in skills/advise-project-approach/SKILL.md. That file is the source of truth for the workflow agents actually run.

Everything else in this repo exists to package, explain, test, or distribute that skill.

Where This Fits

Use recent-signal tools to discover what changed.

Use advise-project-approach to decide what to build, change, defer, or avoid.

The skill is not trying to be a general search engine. It is a project-judgment workflow for turning evidence into engineering decisions.

What Changed in v0.3

v0.3 focuses on the thing generic AI stack advice often misses: real operating cost.

Adds pricing and operating-cost analysis for managed services, hosting, storage, auth, AI APIs, observability, and lock-in.
Treats "free to start" as a claim to verify, not a reason to recommend a vendor.
Makes tradeoffs more blunt: what you gain, what you give up, what becomes harder later, and when the recommendation becomes wrong.
Clarifies that the core workflow is vendor-agnostic: SKILL.md can be copied into any agent harness.
Adds a pricing-focused example for Supabase-style recommendations.

What Changed in v0.2

Based on launch feedback, v0.2 makes the skill more rigorous and easier to judge:

Adds a clear decision methodology: constraints -> comparables -> transferable patterns -> tradeoffs -> recommendation -> failure conditions.
Treats comparable projects as evidence, not a popularity vote.
Adds repo-size and token-budget rules for large codebases and monorepos.
Requires the output to say what was inspected, sampled, skipped, and where the recommendation is provisional.
Adds A/B examples showing where the skill should change generic AI advice.

Try These Prompts

"What's the best way to build a self-hosted bookmark manager?"
"Research comparable projects before I start this."
"I'm halfway through building a Node/Express API. Is my approach right?"
"Review my finished project at github.com/owner/repo."
"Should I use Postgres or SQLite for this?"
"What stack should I use given I know Python and want to self-host?"
"Should I use Supabase/Firebase/Neon/Vercel, or will pricing hurt later?"

What It Does

Drop it into your agent and it will:

Pre-build: Research your stack, find comparable real projects, compare architecture options, and hand you a build plan before you commit to anything you will regret in month three.
Mid-build: Inspect your repo, identify what is actually wrong, not just what is fashionable to fix, and give you a prioritized list of changes ordered by impact.
Post-build: Review your finished project against mature comparables, call out the gaps, and tell you what to harden before you ship.

It does the research loop a good engineer would do manually: understand the goal, inspect the evidence, study credible comparables, evaluate the tradeoffs, and recommend the highest-leverage path.

No vibes. Evidence first.

Works Beyond Claude/Codex

The workflow is intentionally self-contained in its runtime skill file:

skills/advise-project-approach/SKILL.md

The packaged .skill file and agents/openai.yaml are convenience metadata for compatible installers and UIs. A non-Claude or non-Codex harness can copy the SKILL.md instructions, adapt its own trigger/loading mechanism, and still use the same decision workflow.

advise-project-approach

Popularity

What's Inside

README