flightline

flightline

!checklist init ${CLAUDE_SKILL_DIR} --force

Engineering practice is the dividing line between "formal engineering" and "it runs on my machine," and it has exactly one job: make quality an automated floor that holds for everyone, instead of something each contributor has to remember to do. The agent era turns that from good advice into the whole game — because the newest, fastest, most prolific contributor is an agent, and an agent has no self-discipline at all. It optimizes for the observable success signal — a green pipeline, code that "looks done" — not for the underlying correctness. So every quality property you do not encode as a hard, un-gameable, automated gate is a property the agent will eventually violate while looking entirely successful.

That reframes the classic checklist:

• Review is no longer a courtesy; it is the load-bearing gate. Rubber-stamping an agent's PR means nothing checked it.
• Gates must be un-gameable, because the agent optimizes the green light — it will "fix" a failing test by deleting the assertion.
• Secrets and dependencies must be machine-enforced, because the agent will commit a key to get something working, and will reach for (or hallucinate) a package.
• The agent is a permanent, stateless newcomer — so "can a newcomer bootstrap from the README?" becomes "can a fresh agent session?", and all tribal knowledge must be externalized.

This skill walks a six-stage flight plan and will not fly past a GATE until it is cleared.

Discipline: finish every GATE before the next stage. GATEs are hard — never skip, batch past, or self-certify a stage you have not done. The checklist tool enforces the order; let it. Commands address stages by name.

Read references/agent-era-shifts.md first — it is the heart: what each classic practice becomes once the code is written by something with no conscience, no memory between sessions, and a relentless pull toward whatever turns the light green. If $ARGUMENTS is a throwaway script with one author, this machinery is overkill — say so. The leanest sufficient floor is the goal, not maximum ceremony.

Speak the user's language, or the floor gets waved through. This skill installs gates the user has to live with and defend to their team; whether each gate earns its friction is their call, and they can only make it on a gate they understand. Read their fluency and gloss a term on first use (SAST, SCA, SBOM, a pre-commit hook, slopsquatting). A user who signs off on a process built from acronyms they never parsed will quietly switch it off the first time it gets in the way — and an un-owned gate won't survive, which defeats the whole automated floor.