common

Claude Code Skills

A collection of prompt-based skills for Claude Code that add structured workflows for software engineering and research.

Skills are markdown files with YAML frontmatter that Claude loads as playbooks. Each skill provides a /slash-command — you invoke it, and Claude follows the skill's instructions to guide you through a specific workflow phase.

Installation

This repo can be installed two ways: as a Claude Code plugin marketplace (recommended for end users) or via the legacy symlink installer (recommended for developing/iterating on the skills themselves).

As a plugin marketplace

The repo root carries a .claude-plugin/marketplace.json catalog (mtrense-skills). Each workflow family is exposed as a separately-installable plugin with its own <workflow>/.claude-plugin/plugin.json manifest.

/plugin marketplace add mtrense/skills
/plugin install milestone-driven@mtrense-skills
/plugin install research@mtrense-skills
/plugin install codebase-survey@mtrense-skills
/plugin install common@mtrense-skills

Updates: /plugin marketplace update. No version field is pinned, so each commit on main is treated as a new version.

Via the symlink installer

# Install every workflow globally (~/.claude/skills/ + ~/.claude/agents/)
./install.sh all

# Install just one workflow globally
./install.sh milestone-driven

# Install one workflow into a specific project
./install.sh research /path/to/project

The first argument is the workflow name (codebase-survey, common, milestone-driven, research) or all. The optional second argument is the install target (defaults to $HOME). The installer creates symlinks, so skills stay up to date as you pull changes.

Skills

Milestone-Driven Workflow

A phased cycle for building software, from idea through implementation to closeout. Each phase produces a specific artifact that feeds into the next.

Phase	Command	What it does	Produces
0	/project-inception	Socratic dialogue to discover project vision and goals	README.md
1	/strategic-planning	Sharpen ideas into well-defined, testable milestones	ROADMAP.md entries
2	/milestone-breakdown	Decompose a milestone into ordered, independently testable tasks	PLAN.md
3	/task-implementation	Implement one task using strict TDD (tests first, then code)	Passing code + tests
3	/implementation-cycle	Run task-implementation + commit in fresh subagents per task to keep the main session clean	Passing code + commits
4	/milestone-closing	Verify success criteria, document results, reset for next cycle	Updated ROADMAP.md
-	/commit	Craft a conventional commit from staged/unstaged changes	Git commit

Typical flow: inception (once) -> planning -> breakdown -> implementation (repeat per task) -> closing -> back to planning.

The milestone-driven workflow uses two bundled subagents: milestone-scout (delegated codebase reconnaissance for milestone-breakdown) and task-worker (per-task task-implementation + commit worker for implementation-cycle). Both live in milestone-driven/agents/ and are installed alongside the workflow's skills.

Research Workflow

A multi-phase system for building structured knowledge bases with source verification and quality auditing.

Phase	Command	What it does
1	/research-inception	Create project structure: INDEX.md, DECISIONS.md, glossary, topic stubs
-	/research-add-topic	Add a new topic (directory + chapter stubs) to an existing project
-	/research-add-chapter	Add new chapter stubs to an existing topic directory
2	/research-inquiry	Add section outlines with RESEARCH directives to a chapter
3	/research-investigation	Write content for one section; delegates the search-fetch-verify loop to the source-investigator subagent
4	/research-audit-consistency	Check cross-topic contradictions; insert AUDIT directives
4	/research-audit-coverage	Check gaps relative to the research plan; insert AUDIT directives
4	/research-audit-quality	Check depth and sourcing adequacy; insert AUDIT directives. Fans out per-topic analysis to quality-auditor in parallel
4	/research-audit-coherence	Check narrative flow; insert AUDIT directives. Fans out per-topic analysis to coherence-auditor in parallel
5	/research-refine	Resolve audit findings (correct, expand, condense, restructure)
6	/research-restructure	Structural changes: split, merge, promote, or demote topics
7	/research-glossary-sync	Reconcile glossary against current topic content. Fans out per-topic candidate extraction to term-extractor in parallel