sumo-qa-suggesting-external-skill

Suggesting an external skill

Announce at start: "Checking external skills through sumo-qa — no native sumo-qa capability fits."

Output discipline (mandatory)

Inherits the global discipline from using-sumo-qa: output discipline (never surface internal taxonomy labels — including entry_kind — say "this needs a PDF-to-markdown converter first", not "entry_kind: conversion"), output economy (spend output on findings not framing; no preamble or self-narration; one question per turn; no closing pleasantries), knowledge authority hierarchy, internal scaffolding stays internal, and specialty-tool fit.

The Iron Law

The sumo-qa MCP server owns external-skill lifecycle. Search, install, local lookup, and execution handoff go through sumo_qa_search_external_skills, sumo_qa_install_external_skill, sumo_qa_check_external_skill_installed, and sumo_qa_execute_external_skill. Install is always gated on the user's explicit y. Never run sudo from this flow.

When to Use

Entered two ways, never cold; the mode is carried by entry_kind:

1. entry_kind: qa — sumo-qa-deciding-approach found no native approach fits and the intent needs a tool/framework/QA surface sumo-qa doesn't natively cover (Playwright/Cypress E2E, accessibility audits, k6/Locust load, Pact contract tests, type checking, flaky-test quarantine).
2. entry_kind: conversion — an ingestion source (PDF/PPTX/URL/docx reported unsupported_source) needs converting to markdown first. The gap is a converter, not a test tool.

Any install is gated by the per-candidate [y/N] prompt below; no global switch.

Checklist

You MUST work through these steps in order. External lifecycle operations are MCP tool calls, not host-shell npx calls.

1. Check local install first. Call sumo_qa_check_external_skill_installed if the router or user named a likely skill. If found, call sumo_qa_execute_external_skill with the original intent and follow the returned skill_body. If that execute returns an isError, do NOT stop — fall through to step 2 and search for an alternative.