Code Quality skills for your AI agent.
Five skills for the code itself, at the level of files, functions and names rather than systems. Clean Code supplies the readability rules — intention-revealing names, functions that do one thing, error handling that doesn’t bury the logic. Refactoring supplies the named, behavior-preserving transformations and the discipline of keeping tests green between steps. Software Design aims at complexity, judging modules by how much they hide behind how small an interface. Legacy Code handles the case where there are no tests to protect anything. Pragmatic Programmer covers the habits underneath all of it: DRY as a rule about knowledge, orthogonality, tracer bullets.
This is the category that changes agent output most directly, because agents write code constantly and default to whatever compiles. With these loaded you get names that survive review, a long function split with a named refactoring rather than an ad-hoc rewrite, characterization tests before anyone touches the frightening module, and an argument — sometimes a pushback — when a proposed split would spread complexity rather than reduce it.
02 Choosing
Which code quality skill should I install first?
Ask what is wrong with the file actually open in front of you.
The pairing that does the most work is Clean Code with Refactoring: one names what good looks like, the other performs the surgery safely. If the code has no tests, put Legacy Code in front of both.
Everything else assumes a safety net you do not have yet.
03 The six skills
All six Code Quality skills.
Each installs on its own, in about thirty seconds, and works in any agent that reads the open agentskills.io format.
04 Used by
Where these six
get sequenced.
Guides and guided journeys that run Code Quality skills alongside the rest of the library — in the order that stops you fixing the wrong thing first.
05 Questions
Before you install.
The four we get asked most about this stack. The generic ones — pricing, licence, agents — live on the library page.
Clean Code and Software Design disagree about function length. Which one wins?
Neither, and that’s deliberate. Clean Code argues functions should be small and do one thing. Ousterhout argues that splitting purely for brevity creates shallow modules and spreads complexity across more places than it removes. Installed together, they’ll disagree over a long-but-cohesive function — and you’ll get the complexity argument stated rather than a rule applied silently. If your team has settled the question, say so in the prompt and your agent follows your convention.
Do these apply to code my agent writes, or only to code review?
Both, and the writing side is where you feel it most. Skills load when a task calls for them, so they shape new code as it’s produced — naming, function boundaries, error handling — rather than waiting for a cleanup pass. The review path is still worth using explicitly: point the agent at a module and ask for violations, and you’ll get named smells and specific transformations instead of general remarks about readability.
Some of these books are decades old. Are they still right for AI-written code?
The failure mode they address got more common, not less. Generated code compiles, passes, and reads like nobody expected to maintain it — which is precisely the problem Fowler, Martin and Feathers were writing about. The parts that dated are stylistic and language-specific; the parts that matter here are about naming, coupling and safe change, and those don’t care who typed the code. Treat the contested positions as informed opinion to argue with.
How is this different from the Improve Code Quality journey?
The journey takes a vibe-coded prototype to production by running these skills plus others in a fixed order, with a decision question at each phase and a written artifact you keep. Installing skills individually is for the narrower job — this one module, this pull request, this untested file you have to change on Tuesday. Same frameworks, different unit of work: a program versus a single tool.
Every skill installs alone. The library installs together.
Install all six, or just one.
npx skills add wondelai/skills --all --global MIT licensed · Claude, Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes · No account