Four borrowed skills, and only four

D-059 installed four published workflow skills into the harness and deliberately left the rest behind. The loop of the build stays the project's own.

Context

The build already has a spine: a maker produces a change, a fresh-context checker grades it against written criteria, and status lives in GitHub issues. A well-known set of agent skills was available.

Decision

Four skills were installed into the harness's own skill folder, so they are available in every session: tdd for test-first development, diagnosing-bugs for a bug that will not reproduce, and grilling and grill-me for interviewing the PM until the ambiguities in a plan are gone. The publication's process skills were not installed: implement, to-spec, to-tickets, code-review, triage, wayfinder and the rest (D-059).

Alternatives rejected

Taking the whole set. Each process skill duplicates a part of the spine already in place, and each is written for a reader who reviews diffs, which the PM is not. Two ways to do every job is the complication the PM asked to avoid.

Why

The borrowed skills cover test-first development, a bug that will not reproduce, and interrogating a plan before it becomes work. The others would replace decisions the project has already made, so the borrowed workflow does not own the loop. Ours does.

Consequences

Two adaptations were needed. grill-me used a flag this harness does not have, so it is expressed through the same whenToUse field the build and check skills use. tdd and diagnosing-bugs expect a context file and ADRs; here those are the clinic facts file and the decision log, and the repo's own instructions tell agents not to create a second copy. grill-me aims straight at the failure the working agreement calls the real one: not bugs, but building the wrong thing perfectly.

Status

Current, installed 2026-09-13. See overview.