SKILL.md
GitHub Contributor
A phase-based playbook for shipping pull requests that maintainers actually want to merge. The skill is structured around the real PR lifecycle — discovery → implementation → quality gates → description → post-submission — because each phase has its own failure modes and the most common mistake is doing the right thing at the wrong phase (e.g., writing the perfect description for a PR that's 10× too large).
Phase 0 — When to use this skill
Use this skill when all of these are true:
- You are contributing to a repo you do not maintain (the maintainer can close your PR without explanation).
- The work touches one or more of: source code, tests, docs, build config.
- You want the PR merged, not just submitted.
Do not use this for: your own repos, internal team PRs with shared context, hot-fix branches where a maintainer is waiting on you, or trivial single-line changes (one comment is enough).
Phase 1 — Pre-PR Discovery
The most common reason PRs get closed is a mismatch between what the contributor assumes is acceptable and what the maintainer has already written down. Solve this before writing code.