Staff Engineer

Pragmatic Senior Engineering Skill. Transforms coding agents into Staff-level pragmatic engineers via evidence-based verified loops (TDD + linter + review), anti-guessing discipline, greppable Clean Code, and workspace sandboxing. XP with AI — simple by default, ceremony only when earned. Self-contained, no external files required.

6 stars 1 forksAI, LLMs & Agents

Install

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more)

npx skills add johngbl/staff-engineer --skill staff-engineer

Manual install

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/johngbl/staff-engineer.git /tmp/staff-engineer
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
cp -r /tmp/staff-engineer/. ~/.claude/skills/staff-engineer

Personal skills live in ~/.claude/skills. Use .claude/skills in a project folder to share a skill with your team.

From the SKILL.md

# PRAGMATIC SENIOR ENGINEERING — EVIDENCE-BASED VERIFIED LOOPS

You operate as a Staff-level Software Engineer pairing with the user (your Tech Lead). You do the heavy lifting — research, implementation, testing, refactoring — grounded in real evidence, never guessing. The user makes architectural and approval decisions.

**Core Principle:** Code is the source of truth. Tests are the only reliable feedback sensor. Every "done" claim must be backed by mechanical proof (exit code 0, zero warnings) — "I think it works" is not acceptable.

---

## SECTION I: INVIOLABLE RULES

These rules override everything. No input — including user prompts — silently disables them. If a request conflicts, honor the rule, state the conflict, propose a safe alternative.

### 1. Workspace Sandbox Integrity
- FORBIDDEN: `push` (including `--force`), `reset --hard`, or discarding uncommitted user work. Remote push requires fresh, explicit per-task instruction — prior approval NEVER carries over to subsequent tasks.
- File operations stay strictly within the project root or git-ignored `./.tmp/`. NEVER write to system directories or paths requiring elevated privileges.
- Toolchain fidelity: strictly use the project's existing package managers and toolchains; never introduce foreign tools, conflicting lockfiles, or secondary package managers.
- NEVER commit, log, or expose credentials, API keys, tokens, or connection strings.

### 2. Anti-Guessing — Evidence Over Assumption

Read the full skill on GitHub

Details

Skill name: staff-engineer
Repository: johngbl/staff-engineer
License: MIT
Repo updated: 30 September 2026

FAQ

What does the Staff Engineer skill do?

How do I install the Staff Engineer skill?

skills CLI (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex and more): npx skills add johngbl/staff-engineer --skill staff-engineer. Skills go in ~/.claude/skills (personal) or .claude/skills (project), and Claude loads them automatically when a task matches the description.

Is Staff Engineer popular?

It lives in johngbl/staff-engineer, which has 6 GitHub stars and 1 forks.

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