# Where the Felhom skills came from

The four **product-domain** skills — `felhom-app-catalog`, `felhom-build-deploy`, `felhom-testing`,
`felhom-ui-design` — are original, written from this project's own measured failures.

The five **process-domain** skills added 2026-08-25 are **adaptations, not copies**, of material from
two public MIT-licensed collections:

- **`mattpocock/skills`** — MIT.
- **`backnotprop/pstack`** — MIT.

Neither repo is installed, vendored, or depended on. Nothing was copied verbatim. Each skill was
rewritten in Felhom's own terms, in the house frontmatter shape taken from
`skills/felhom-testing/SKILL.md`, and every rule that already had a home elsewhere in this workspace
points at that home instead of restating it.

| Skill | Derives from |
|---|---|
| `felhom-evidence` | the confidence-grading and verify-the-artifact material in both collections, merged with this workspace's own standing rules 2 and 3 (`documentation/runbooks/workspace-CLAUDE.md`) |
| `felhom-diagnosis` | the loop-first debugging material in both collections |
| `felhom-plain-language` | the half of the writing guidance that cuts empty and promotional words; the ASD-STE100 rule and the two-option decision format are Felhom's own |
| `felhom-handoff` | the session pause/resume material in `backnotprop/pstack` |
| `felhom-doc-authoring` | the instruction-authoring material in both collections |

## Deliberately excluded — a decision, not an oversight

Recorded here so a future session that finds the upstream repos can see these were weighed.

1. **"Stop asking and proceed on reversible work."** It reasons from *code is cheap and revertible*.
   Felhom's work reaches live hosts and one real customer's data, where that premise is false, and it
   contradicts the standing rule that decisions go to the operator as ranked options.
2. **"Add voice, vary rhythm, let some mess in."** The direct opposite of the ASD-STE100 rule that
   `felhom-plain-language` exists to carry. The empty-word-cutting half of that same upstream
   material was kept.
3. **A router or "mode" skill that picks a playbook and owns the session.** It takes over the
   process, and would fight the `TASK-*.md` / `RUNBOOK-*.md` workflow already in use.
4. **Ticket, triage, spec-publishing and issue-tracker skills.**
   `documentation/backlog/OPEN-ITEMS.md` is the single source of truth for open work; a skill that
   writes work items anywhere else creates a second one.
5. **A codebase-architecture-survey skill.** It hands back a list of things it judges wrong without
   knowing which were chosen deliberately, and this project has already paid four times for a
   deliberate design being reported as a defect.
6. **Everything naming a tool this project does not use** — Cursor commands and transcript paths,
   model names, Linear / Sentry / Notion / Slack sources, GitHub issue trackers.