scratchydisk-skills
Personal Claude Code skills library — workflow orchestration helpers I built after observing the patterns I kept hand-orchestrating across long-running projects.
Skills
devils-advocate-loop
Iterates devil's-advocate review on a plan or spec until a round finds no real bugs. Each round: surface concerns, apply fixes inline, commit, repeat. Min 2 rounds, max 4. Stops when only nits / cosmetic issues remain.
Use it when refining a written artifact (plan, spec, design doc) before execution. For one-shot review of finished code, use the original devils-advocate skill instead.
See skills/devils-advocate-loop/ for the full definition.
karpathy-guidelines
Behavioural guidelines that reduce common LLM coding mistakes — surface assumptions, keep changes surgical, prefer simplicity, define verifiable success criteria. Derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls.
Use it when writing, reviewing, or refactoring code and you want the model to push back on ambiguity instead of guessing, and to avoid drive-by refactors and bloated abstractions.
See skills/karpathy-guidelines/ for the full definition.
anti-ai-tells
A field guide for stripping the AI-chatbot fingerprint out of prose — puffery, suspicious triplets, "not only X but also Y", trailing -ing analysis, formulaic section structure, em-dash overuse, and the other patterns that signal "this was generated." Thirteen pattern categories plus a twelve-item review checklist.
Use it when drafting or reviewing long-form prose (articles, blog posts, essays, reports, Wikipedia edits, marketing copy, emails, fiction) — anywhere "this was clearly written by ChatGPT" would be a problem. Also useful as a self-review pass after generating any long text.
See skills/anti-ai-tells/ for the full definition.
Installing
This repo is a Claude Code plugin marketplace. Run these from inside any Claude Code session:
/plugin marketplace add Scratchydisk/claude-skills
/plugin install scratchydisk-skills@scratchydisk-skills
After installation, skills are available via the Skill tool / /skill-name invocations in any Claude Code session, regardless of project.
Updating
Claude Code refreshes marketplaces and installed plugins at startup when auto-update is enabled for the marketplace. Third-party marketplaces (this one) default to auto-update off — enable it once and updates land on the next launch.
To turn auto-update on:
- Run
/plugin to open the plugin manager.
- Select Marketplaces →
scratchydisk-skills.
- Choose Enable auto-update.
When a plugin updates, Claude Code prompts you to run /reload-plugins to pick up changes without restarting.
To refresh manually instead of enabling auto-update:
/plugin marketplace update scratchydisk-skills
/reload-plugins
See Configure auto-updates in the official Claude Code docs for details, including how administrators can force auto-update for an org via extraKnownMarketplaces.
Layout
.
├── .claude-plugin/
│ ├── plugin.json # plugin manifest
│ └── marketplace.json # marketplace manifest
├── skills/
│ ├── devils-advocate-loop/
│ │ ├── SKILL.md # skill body — what Claude reads
│ │ ├── README.md # human-readable docs
│ │ └── references/ # bundled reference material
│ ├── karpathy-guidelines/
│ │ ├── SKILL.md
│ │ ├── README.md
│ │ └── references/
│ └── anti-ai-tells/
│ ├── SKILL.md
│ └── README.md
└── README.md # this file
Adding new skills
- Drop a new skill directory under
skills/<skill-name>/ with at minimum a SKILL.md containing YAML frontmatter (name, description) and the skill body.
- Bump the
version field in both .claude-plugin/plugin.json and .claude-plugin/marketplace.json. The plugin.json value silently wins if they disagree, so a stale manifest masks the bump and existing users see no update.
- Commit, tag (
vX.Y.Z), push the branch and the tag.
- Users with auto-update enabled get the new version on their next Claude Code launch; others run
/plugin marketplace update scratchydisk-skills followed by /reload-plugins.
Acknowledgements
The devil's advocate questioning frameworks and blind-spot references were derived from notmanas/claude-code-skills.
The karpathy-guidelines skill is imported from Scratchydisk/andrej-karpathy-skills (a fork of forrestchang/andrej-karpathy-skills), derived from Andrej Karpathy's observations on LLM coding pitfalls. MIT-licensed.
