Thinking disciplines for AI coding agents. Skills that enforce good engineering habits — not tooling workflows, but decision frameworks.

# Install all skills
npx skills add tmdgusya/engineering-disciplines

# Install a specific skill
npx skills add tmdgusya/engineering-disciplines --skill rob-pike
npx skills add tmdgusya/engineering-disciplines --skill systematic-debugging

Rob Pike's 5 Rules of Programming — prevents premature optimization by enforcing measurement-driven development.

Triggers on: "optimize", "slow", "performance", "bottleneck", "speed up", "make faster", "too slow"

The 5 Rules:

1. You can't tell where a program is going to spend its time. Bottlenecks occur in surprising places. Don't guess — prove it.
2. Measure. Don't tune for speed until you've measured. Even then, don't unless one part of the code overwhelms the rest.
3. Fancy algorithms are slow when n is small, and n is usually small. Big-O doesn't matter when constants dominate.
4. Fancy algorithms are buggier than simple ones. Use simple algorithms and simple data structures.
5. Data dominates. Choose the right data structures and the algorithms become self-evident. "Write stupid code that uses smart objects."

Pike's rules 1 and 2 restate Tony Hoare's famous maxim "Premature optimization is the root of all evil." Ken Thompson rephrased rules 3 and 4 as "When in doubt, use brute force." Rule 5 was previously stated by Fred Brooks in The Mythical Man-Month.

Enforces a strict reproduce-first, root-cause-first, failing-test-first debugging workflow. No guessing, no shotgun fixes.

Triggers on: any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior

Hard gates — no exceptions:

1. Reproduce or make observable before fixing
2. State a root-cause hypothesis before fixing
3. Create a failing test before fixing
4. Verify one hypothesis at a time
5. No "while I'm here" refactoring during fixes
6. Three failed fix attempts → suspect structural issues

Includes reference guides for root-cause tracing, defense-in-depth validation, condition-based waiting (flaky test elimination), and a test polluter bisection script.

MIT