ai-engineering: Skill for Claude Code

Turn the spec into tasks

What it produces

specs/NNN-slug/plan.md, beside the spec it implements.

Steps

1. Read the spec, and only the specs it names — the one it supersedes, the ones it depends on. Nothing else. A hundred specs cost the index plus the ones you were told about.
2. Write tasks small enough that each one is a commit, each one numbered and each one opening with an empty box: 1. [ ] **Title** —. For every task, four things: file (the one it touches), check (the command that fails today and passes after), rollback (how to undo it), done when (in one sentence, testable). Never write [x]. The box is filled by ai-eng spec show <id> --task <n> --tick, which runs the check and seals what it measured; an empty box means no command has run over these bytes yet, which is not the same as "not done".
3. A check is a command, never a judgement. "Looks right" is not a check. If a task's check reads "the agent decides X", say in one line why a script cannot do it — and if you cannot say why, write the script instead. That is rule 12, and it applies here first because here is where the cost is decided.
4. If the spec adds anything that gets a URL, two tasks are mandatory and named:
   • a CI/CD task: build, lint, test and security analysis on every push, deploy from the default branch, zero manual steps;
   • an observability task covering the eight signals the spec lists, each passing with a command. Without them the plan is not finished, whatever else is in it.
5. Order the tasks so that the first failing check appears as early as possible. A plan whose first six tasks cannot fail is a plan that finds out too late.
6. Say what you are not doing, and why. The deliberate omissions are the part reviewers most often need and least often get.

Done when

• Every task has a file, a check, a rollback and a "done when".
• The deployable tasks exist if the spec is deployable, and are absent if it is not.
• The person has approved it, recorded as an ADR at the spec and plan digests. That record is the gate: no code before it.
• The reviewer got ai-eng report view --spec <NNN>'s file:// link beside the Markdown; the ADR at the two digests stays the gate, and the page is how it is read.