ai-engineering: Skill for Claude Code

Ask the tree, not the author

What it produces

At most ten questions per round, returned to the session, each carrying the sentence it attacks, the command that tested it, what the command printed, and its verdict. The author folds the round into the specification's ## Grill section, so the verdicts land in the document they attack; no file is written beside it.

Why it is not the section inside the spec

ai-spec requires the author to challenge their own recommendation once, and that section is worth keeping — but the questioner and the answerer are the same reader, and a reader can only reason about what they already wrote. Measured on this repository: four of twenty specs carry that section, and not one of the four contains a command or a file reference. Three claims in one of them were false, and executing them is what found it.

Steps

1. Read only the specification and the tree. Not the plan, not the pull request, not the conversation that produced it — a challenger who reads the author's reasoning inherits it.
2. Choose what to attack: the sentences whose truth changes a decision — a count, a path, a behaviour, a claim about another file, a "no code reads this". Do not sweep every sentence: an exhaustive pass spends the round on sentences no decision turns on, so the selection is the work.
3. Run the command before asking the question. The sentence gets executed, not re-read: a count gets counted, a path gets opened, a behaviour gets run. Paste what came back, including when it agrees.
4. Return at most ten findings, worst first, one question at a time. WRONG when the tree says otherwise, UNPROVEN when nothing in the tree can decide it and say which — those are different problems for the author.
5. The author folds each finding into ## Grill and revises the attacked sentences in place. A round that found nothing checkable to attack returns that as the answer nothing checkable failed, and the section carries it.