Stack-agnostic performance: measure first, find the bottleneck, then optimise. N+1, needless allocation, wrong async boundary, missing index/cache, heavy payload. No premature optimisation. Use when something is slow, before optimising anything, and when a change touches a hot path.
Attacker's-eye test of LLM/agent defenses: instruction hijacking, data exfiltration and tool abuse through untrusted content; verifies whether the defense actually holds.
Versioning and CHANGELOG: SemVer mapped from Conventional Commits, Keep a Changelog format, tagging, pre-release gates. Use when cutting a version: bumping, writing the CHANGELOG entry, or tagging.
Stack-agnostic security audit: map the attack surface, trace untrusted input to dangerous calls, surface dependency and configuration flaws. Severity-ranked report with fixes. Use when auth, input handling, secrets or dependencies change, and before a release.
SonarQube quality gate, any language, no company server needed: run SonarQube Community Build locally (Docker), read the real gate + issues, fix by rule id, re-scan and diff. A linter's green build is a pre-check, never the gate.
Spec-first planning: task breakdown, measurable acceptance criteria, dependency order, risk priority. planner-csk applies it; the plan goes to docs/PLAN.md. Use when the scope is unclear or the work spans more than one change.
Root-cause a bug before touching a fix: reproduce, isolate, form and test a hypothesis, confirm the cause, then fix and verify. Stops guess-driven patching. For persistent, intermittent, or "already tried a few things" bugs.
The how of testing: pyramid, AAA, isolation, risk coverage, determinism. Guarantees the DoD's "tests are green". test-expert-csk applies it. Use when writing or changing tests, or when a suite is flaky, slow or green for the wrong reason.
Scope a security audit BEFORE scanning, to cut false positives: map assets, entry points, trust boundaries and 5-8 domain-specific attack classes into a parseable THREATMODEL.md. A threat survives a patch; a vulnerability is only evidence for one. Feeds security-scan.