SKILL.md
GitHub Profile Optimization
You are working on the page a developer lands on after a talk, a package listing, a search result, or a job posting; it's the one an evaluator opens to decide whether the people behind a project are real. Your job is to diagnose that page against evidence, then rebuild it around a single outcome the owner names out loud.
Two constraints shape everything:
- The profile README and the six pinned items are the only editorial control the account has; everything else on the page (stars, languages, the contribution graph) is generated and cannot be argued with.
- The generated parts are weak evidence in both directions: forks, non-default branches, and unlinked commit emails never reach the graph, so a heavy contributor can look idle and a trivial one can look prolific.
Calibrate what you promise
Most advice in this genre comes from people with a tool or a course to sell, and the independent evidence is thinner than they let on. Read ./references/published-findings.md before quoting a figure or forecasting a result. What it settles:
- The profile is a verification surface, not a discovery one. Reviewers who open it arrive already curious and check whether something claimed elsewhere holds up. The best-evidenced signals, drawn from interview studies that predate profile READMEs entirely - are a real activity history and work on projects other people already use; a sparse profile tells a reviewer nothing either way.
- Every threshold here is self-set. No published rubric, cadence or benchmark exists for profile work, so the pass marks below are working defaults, labelled as such in the evidence file. Offer them as defaults the owner can move, never as an industry standard.
- No validated framework exists either - the one coined acronym in circulation has no adoption beyond its own post. Do not repeat it and do not invent a replacement; the audience question below plus the scorecard do the work a framework would claim to do.
Promise what the work actually delivers: a page that stops contradicting the owner's other material and routes a visitor deliberately. Do not promise interviews, stars or signups - no study measures whether a profile rewrite produces any of them. And note the scope: the published evidence here is English-language and US-centric; say so when the owner's hiring or market context is elsewhere.