pebkac-push

PEBKAC Push™

A Claude Code Skill by Stesso

---

[Soft piano. 6am light. A technical cofounder sits at his kitchen table in yesterday's clothes, staring at a Slack notification he hasn't opened yet.]

---

Is someone you love pushing directly to main?

You're not alone. Every year, millions of technical cofounders are affected by PEBKAC — a degenerative condition in which a well-meaning but dangerously confident non-technical partner gains unsupervised access to the codebase. Symptoms typically onset in the late evening and intensify rapidly after the discovery of AI coding assistants.

Early warning signs may include:

• Unexplained console.log("HELLO IS THIS WORKING") in production
• A 47MB screen recording committed to the repo
• Pull requests titled "fixed stuff" submitted at 4:12am
• package.json changes no one asked for
• Entire functions commented out "just in case"
• Hardcoded localhost:3000 URLs deployed to staging
• An .env file with your production API keys pushed to a public repo
• Git history that reads like a crime scene
• 14 commits in 90 minutes, the last three just titled "ok," "ok now," and "please"
• The phrase "I just made a few little tweaks along the way"

If your cofounder exhibits two or more of these symptoms, it may be time to talk to your terminal about PEBKAC Push.

---

PEBKAC Push is a first-of-its-kind Claude Code skill clinically formulated to deliver enterprise-grade git hygiene to people who think rebase is a type of housing refinance.

In just six guided phases, PEBKAC Push works at the source — intercepting dangerous commits before they reach your codebase — while preserving your cofounder's self-esteem and desire to contribute.

How it works:

PEBKAC Push starts by gently confirming your cofounder is not, in fact, working directly on main. It then performs a full workspace audit, presenting every changed file and asking — in a supportive, nonjudgmental way — "Did you mean to do this?"

It scans for secrets, API keys, debug artifacts, and that one .env file they keep trying to commit. It runs the build. It runs the linter. It runs only the relevant tests so your cofounder doesn't have to sit through the full suite pretending to understand what's happening.

New in this release:

PEBKAC Push now performs deep lint warning analysis — because your cofounder's AI assistant helpfully added a useEffect with a missing dependency, and now the UI shows stale data but only on Tuesdays and only if you navigate away and come back. PEBKAC Push reads every warning, determines if it's the kind that causes real bugs or just the kind that hurts a linter's feelings, explains the risk in plain language ("this code remembers an old version of your data and doesn't notice when it changes"), and fixes it. For React projects, it will even open a browser and test the affected UI before and after. Your cofounder's code has never been this thoroughly reviewed. Yours probably hasn't either.

It also now detects sibling PR conflicts — the silent killer of multi-contributor workflows. If three people all have PRs open against the same branch, each one looks clean on its own, but the moment one merges, the other two explode. PEBKAC Push checks every open sibling PR for conflicts before your cofounder submits, and offers to pre-resolve them. It's like defensive driving, but for git.

And perhaps most importantly, it now runs a fix-and-verify loop — because every fix has a nonzero chance of introducing a new problem. The build passes, the lint fix breaks the build, the build fix introduces a new warning, the warning fix... you get the idea. PEBKAC Push now iterates: fix, re-check everything, fix again, re-check, up to three passes, until the code is actually clean. Not "the last thing I checked passed" clean. Actually clean.

Then — and this is the breakthrough — it writes regression tests anchored to the business intent of the branch. Not just "does the function return the right number," but "if someone breaks this feature next week, will anything catch it." The kind of test a senior engineer writes instinctively and a non-technical contributor would never think to add.

Finally, it merges the latest target branch back in, resolves conflicts with plain-language explanations, and generates a PR so thoroughly documented that reviewers will wonder if your cofounder hired a ghostwriter.

Which, technically, they did.

---

[Warm voice, slightly faster]

Ask your CTO if PEBKAC Push is right for your organization.

---