bender
AI coding conventions and workflow skills for Claude Code, built and used by The Bitfoot Company.
These are practical, opinionated skills for disciplined software engineering — the stuff that keeps code quality high and debugging sessions short. Install them once, use them across every project.
Skills
| Skill | Invocation | When it activates |
|---|
systematic-debugging | /bender:systematic-debugging | Auto — whenever Claude encounters a bug or test failure |
verification-before-completion | /bender:verification-before-completion | Auto — before any "done", "fixed", or "tests pass" claim |
test-driven-development | /bender:test-driven-development | Auto — when implementing features or fixing bugs |
brainstorming | /bender:brainstorming | Auto — when starting new features or design decisions |
code-review | /bender:code-review · /bender:code-review branch | Manual — no arg reviews uncommitted changes; branch reviews everything on the current branch vs. main |
milestone | /bender:milestone · /bender:milestone path/to/ROADMAP.md | Manual — cold-start session skill: finds your roadmap, identifies the next incomplete item, scopes it, and implements it |
pr | /bender:pr · /bender:pr develop | Manual — generates a high-level PR description from the current branch, copies it to the clipboard |
pipeline | /bender:pipeline · /bender:pipeline path/to/ROADMAP.md | Manual — drives every milestone in a roadmap through implementation, CI, code review, and commit |
roadmap | /bender:roadmap · /bender:roadmap "goal description" | Manual — breaks a large feature or initiative into sequenced, single-session milestones and writes them to ROADMAP.md |
summary | /bender:summary | Manual — summarizes the most recent commit or pending changes: what shipped, why it matters, and how it fits into the existing code |
Auto skills load when Claude determines they're relevant. Manual skills only run when you invoke them directly — code-review runs in a fresh subagent context so it has no bias from the implementing session. Use roadmap to plan, then milestone to execute session by session, or pipeline to execute the entire roadmap in one session with automated CI and review loops.
Installation
From within any Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add bitfootco/bender
/plugin install bender@bender
Skills are namespaced under bender: to avoid conflicts with other plugins.
Team setup
To have teammates automatically prompted to install when they trust a project folder, add to .claude/settings.json in your repo:
{
"extraKnownMarketplaces": {
"bender": {
"source": {
"source": "github",
"repo": "bitfootco/bender"
}
}
},
"enabledPlugins": {
"bender@bender": true
}
}
Local development
To test changes live without installing:
claude --plugin-dir .
Skills reload on restart. Make a change, restart, test with /bender:skill-name.
Philosophy
These skills encode the engineering principles The Bitfoot Company works by:
- Root cause over symptom — never fix what you don't understand
- Evidence over assertion — never claim something works without showing it
- Design before code — never build before you know what you're building
- Test first — the test suite is the specification
- Fresh eyes on review — the person who wrote the code is the worst person to review it
