readme-doctor

readme-doctor is a skill for Claude Code from livlign/claude-skills. It costs 88 tokens per session (2,465 once invoked), scanned A, original, MIT.

A review guide for checking a GitHub repository's README, the main introduction and usage document for a code project, against practical documentation patterns. It produces a prioritized list of suggested fixes and can optionally support opening a pull request when requested.

In plain words
What is it for?
It helps maintainers review a README, judge it against the project's audience and category, cite findings by line number, and sort fixes into blocking, high-priority, and optional work.
Why use it?
It finds problems such as unclear project purpose, a lengthy path from installation to first success, hard-to-scan content, audience-specific jargon, stale versions, and dead links.

Skill for Claude Code

Written for Claude Code: shipped in a Claude Code plugin. Also seen: names the AskUserQuestion tool.

Part of the repo-doctor plugin — 1 skill shipped together

Good fit It helps maintainers review a README, judge it against the project's audience and category, cite findings by line number, and sort fixes into blocking, high-priority, and optional work.

Compare 6 skills from other repositories ↓
Install with agentmods
npx agentmods add skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor
Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent
npx skills add livlign/claude-skills --skill readme-doctor
Clone the repo
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/livlign/claude-skills

Made for: Claude Code.

Or install repo-doctor, the plugin that ships this one along with the rest of its 1 skill.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

agentmods badge for readme-doctor

README.md
[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor)
Your own site
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

agentmods 80×15 button for readme-doctor

Your own site · 80×15
<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/livlign/claude-skills/readme-doctor.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>
Per session 88 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.
When invoked 2,465 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.
Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe.
Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.
Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

ModelPer sessionOnce invoked
Fable 5.1 $0.00088 $0.02465
Opus 5 $0.00044 $0.01233
Sonnet 5 $0.00018 $0.00493
Haiku 4.5 $0.00009 $0.00247

Measured 12d ago against content hash 169e60b69ff2, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-09-12, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

readme-doctor scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 12d ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

Origin

Copies of this mod

1 near-identical copy found in the catalogue:

plugins/repo-doctor/skills/readme-doctor/SKILL.md · 194 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 194 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

readme-doctor

Most README problems aren't typos or missing sections — they're shape problems: the hero never lands, install-to-first-success buries the lede, the "what is this" sentence assumes prior context, the badge row is louder than the content. This skill audits a README against patterns that consistently correlate with maintainer outcomes (stars, contributor onboarding, issue quality) and produces a punch list a maintainer can act on in an afternoon.

The skill's quality comes from the rubric being grounded in the repo's actual audience and category, not from a generic checklist. A README for a 50K-star framework needs different things than a personal-project utility.

Phases

  1. Discovery — pick operating mode (Auto / Semi-auto / Manual, §1.1), input the README, infer the repo's category and audience from the scan, agree on what "good" looks like for this specific repo.
  2. Audit — walk the rubric, score each criterion, gather evidence (cite line numbers).
  3. Punch list — prioritize findings P0 (blocking) / P1 (high-leverage) / P2 (nice-to-have), each with a one-line fix.
  4. Optional output — read-only summary by default; on user request, open a PR with concrete edits.

Phase 1 — Discovery

1.1 Operating mode (ask first)

Same three modes as repo-visuals — Auto, Semi-auto (recommended), Manual. Use AskUserQuestion. Mode affects how many decisions are silent vs surfaced; it does not skip rubric checks.

1.2 Input

User may provide:

  • GitHub URLgh repo view + clone shallow
  • Local path → read directly
  • Pasted README text → analyze in place, but the rubric loses any check that needs file-tree context (manifest signals, screenshot presence, examples/ dir, etc.). Flag these as "skipped — paste-only mode."
  • Nothing → ask first

1.3 Scan (collect before judging)

  • README full text + rendered length (lines, words, time-to-scan estimate at 250wpm)
  • Manifest: package.json, Cargo.toml, pyproject.toml, etc. — version, description, keywords
  • File tree (depth 2): does an examples/ exist? docs/? Image assets?
  • Recent commits (last 10): is the repo active? When was last release?
  • GitHub signals: stars, topics, open issues count, latest release date

Read the full file on GitHub · 194 lines

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

  1. 12d ago First seen · 194 lines · 88 tokens per session scan A 169e60b69ff2

Subscribe to this mod's changes

readme-doctor is a skill published in the GitHub repository livlign/claude-skills (19 stars, last pushed 1mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 88 tokens to every session and 2,465 once invoked, about $0.0004 per session on Opus 5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

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