sas94

sas94-skill

A Claude Code skill for writing, reviewing, and debugging SAS 9.4 code with AI assistance.

SAS 9.4 is the daily driver for biostatisticians, health-services researchers, and pharma/claims analysts, yet SAS is underrepresented in LLM training corpora. This skill distills rules and idioms from MIT-licensed sources (sasjs/lint, sasjs/core) plus hand-transcribed SAS-programmer pitfalls (GWU data-mining curriculum), and routes Claude Code to topic-specific reference files on demand.

Status: v0.0.1 pre-release. All 13 reference files are 100% populated across both REQUIRED sections (Overview, Critical Rules, Canonical Idioms, Function/Statement Quick Ref, See Also) and OPTIONAL sections (Silent Pitfalls, Anti-patterns). See docs/coverage-matrix.md for per-file status.

What This Skill Does

When activated, Claude Code can:

• Translate study descriptions into idiomatic SAS 9.4 (DATA step, PROC SQL, macros, PROC FREQ/MEANS/LOGISTIC, hash tables, ODS)
• Catch silent-failure patterns before code ships — MERGE overwrite, LAG-inside-IF, missing retain on accumulators, macro-quoting errors, PROC APPEND shape mismatches, and more
• Enforce the 15 rules from sasjs/lint v2.4.3 covering macro definition, file headers, line formatting, and source hygiene
• Apply sasjs/core macro patterns — positional-required + keyword-optional signatures, %local discipline, iftrue= guards, /*/STORE SOURCE*/ registration
• Route to topic-specific reference files for deep dives

Installation

Recommended: Claude Code plugin marketplace

Two slash commands inside any Claude Code session:

/plugin marketplace add xiaosongz/sas94-skill
/plugin install sas94@sas94-skill

Claude Code fetches this repo, installs the sas94 plugin into the local plugin cache, and activates the skill. Update later with:

/plugin marketplace update sas94-skill

Skill activates on .sas files and SAS-flavored prompt keywords — see plugins/sas94/skills/sas94/SKILL.md for the full trigger list.

Alternative: personal-scope git clone

Prefer git over slash commands? Clone the skill subtree into your personal skills directory (one line):

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/xiaosongz/sas94-skill.git /tmp/sas94-skill && mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills && mv /tmp/sas94-skill/plugins/sas94/skills/sas94 ~/.claude/skills/sas94 && rm -rf /tmp/sas94-skill

Update later by re-running the same command. The plugin marketplace path is cleaner — use it unless you have a reason not to.

Ad-hoc: claude --add-dir <path>

Power-user invocation for one-off skill loading. Clone the repo anywhere, then:

claude --add-dir /path/to/sas94-skill/plugins/sas94/skills/sas94

Claude Code treats that path as an additional skill root for the session only.

Usage

Example prompts

Write a SAS macro that returns an unused libref name, following sasjs/core
conventions.

Merge two claims datasets by member_id; both carry a `paid_amt` column —
make sure the left-side value is preserved.

Review my macro for %local discipline and quote-function usage.

Help me debug a PROC APPEND that errors with "Variable X in DATA set not in
BASE set."

Write a DATA step that computes a lagged diagnosis-date difference, only
for index events.

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