I’m starting a little mini series on this newsletter on AI skills I find useful in my day to day. I’ll be sure to include a copy-pasteable prompt you can use to get your harness to write its own version of these skills.
Today’s skill is the first one: my papercuts coding skill.
The skill is based on the scenario that I’ve just had a discussion about some small coding task that needs doing, either in chat or in real life. In the past, the result would likely have been “let’s raise a ticket in the backlog to address this later”, followed by a single line, non-descript ticket somewhere in the team’s backlog.
The papercuts skill
Now, I head to my harness of choice in the codebase of choice and tell it: “We discussed this problem, and we decided that the solution was to do X, read this link to a thread for context (if there is one available).”
Then the papercuts skill does this:
Raises a new ticket in the backlog with the correct details in it
Performs my git workflow for new tasks (a new worktree prefixed with the backlog reference)
Fixes the issue in code
Raises a draft change for me to review
Now there is no context or history lost, work is tracked and done at the same time for these small papercuts.
Note that this only works for tasks that are small enough to be contained in a manually written prompt (one or two sentences at most). Larger tasks that require some form of system design or architectural guard rails aren’t suitable for this skill.
It’s not ground breaking but the biggest value I get from this is that context is no longer lost, work is tracked properly without the extra admin overhead that a papercut sometimes does not deserve.
The prompt
Here’s a prompt you use to get my harness to write its own version of this skill. Make sure to adjust the bits of information to match your own workflow:
where the backlog lives
git workflow
code review
Write me a skill called “papercuts” that takes a prompt about a task and does the following:
Create a ticket in the backlog with the description, the solution, and the thread link <ADJUST THIS>
Create a fresh git worktree prefixed with the ticket reference (Point this at any existing skill or workflow you have for starting a new coding task) <ADJUST THIS>
Implement the fix in the worktree
Run a code review with four subagents in parallel, apply the good suggestions, and run the tests (Note this is also a seperate skill that I have) <ADJUST THIS>
Raise a draft pull request that references the ticket and thread