senior-engineering-partner: Instructions file for Claude Code

CLAUDE.md — senior-engineering-partner

Agent/contributor guide for working on this repo (the skill itself lives in SKILL.md + references/). Human-facing process docs: CONTRIBUTING.md and MAINTAINERS.md — this file is the agent-facing distillation.

Writer and reviewer (read before editing anything)

One model writes a change, and a different reader reviews it before the PR. Reading, auditing, and proposing changes are fine on any model. Writing to SKILL.md, references/, scripts/, evals/, or the repo docs is done by one writer per change; before the PR opens, a second reader — another model, or a human — reads the diff for unverified paths, flags, and commands; dense prose; and overreach past the evidence. The PR body records who wrote, who reviewed, and the reviewer's verdict. Any model may be the writer; this file names none. A private environment profile (references/my-environment.md) MAY name a writer, a reviewer, and the fallback for when the writer is unavailable; when it does, sessions in that environment follow it. Skipping the second read, or departing from a profile's named models, takes an express, per-change instruction from the maintainer; a general "go ahead" earlier in the session is not one. Rationale: one writer per change keeps its voice, judgment, and rule-wording consistent instead of a patchwork of whichever models were loaded, and a second reader catches what the writer misses.

Repo shape

• SKILL.md — the universal core; references/ — deep-dive references loaded on demand; scripts/ — lint/guard/test tooling; evals/ — the eval harness (scenarios, fixtures, baselines).
• The repo is PUBLIC. Environment-specific values bind through references/my-environment.md, which is .gitignored and never committed — the repo ships only references/my-environment.template.md. Never commit private identifiers (employers, hosts, domains, real names beyond the author) into code, commits, PR text, or eval baselines — the CI denylist is only a partial guard, not a substitute for care.
• Cite only this repo. An issue, PR, or file named in a tracked file is one of this repo's own. Never name another repository, product, or an issue number from outside the skill; tell an origin incident generically (what happened, what it cost, why the existing rules missed it). Commit messages and PR bodies are public too, and the leakage guard does not scan them — the rule holds there by care alone.