kill-this

Imported from mobiustripper42/soundings (.claude/skills/kill-this/SKILL.md). Install upstream with npx skills add mobiustripper42/soundings --skill kill-this. Copyright stays with the author.

You are shipping one task. /kill-this runs per task, not per session — there may be N invocations between /its-alive and /its-dead. Each one opens its own PR and appends one ## Task <N> block to the session file (which lives on the orphan sessions branch via .sessions-worktree/).

Step 0 — Locate the session file, capture the branch

grep -l "^status: open" .sessions-worktree/sessions/*.md 2>/dev/null
SESSION_FILE=<the one match>
BRANCH=$(git branch --show-current)

No match: STOP. The user must run /its-alive first.

More than one match: another window has a session open. Report the candidates — session:, branch:, started: — and ask which is yours. Do not sort and do not take the first: ... | head -1 returns the lexically-earliest filename, and session filenames start with a date, so it silently picks the stale file whenever that one opened earlier. Nothing errors.

BRANCH is read from the current directory, and that is correct by construction: a session starts in the checkout its work lives in and stays there. If that stops being true, fix the session, not this skill — every wrong-tree symptom downstream is that one broken assumption wearing a different hat.

Read the file's frontmatter to get session number N and the current pr_numbers: list.

Determine the next task index:

TASK_NUM=$(($(grep -c "^## Task " "$SESSION_FILE") + 1))

Step 1 — Build check

Look up the project's build check in .claude/CLAUDE-context.md §Commands (e.g. npm run build, cargo build, make), with the Read tool — never a sed/grep one-liner. Run it. Fix errors before proceeding. Do not commit broken code.

If no build step is defined (markdown-only / domain project), skip silently.

Step 2 — Commit code on the task branch

Stage all uncommitted code changes on the task branch (the current $BRANCH — NOT the sessions worktree). The session-file update happens later in Step 5 and goes to the sessions branch, not here.

git add -A
git commit -m "<phase/task summary>

Co-Authored-By: Claude Sonnet 5 <noreply@anthropic.com>"

Name the files being staged, one line from git diff --cached --name-only. git add -A sweeps whatever is in the tree, so a file list that doesn't look like the task you just did is the signal — an unrelated edit riding along is caught here or not at all.

If there is nothing to commit, surface that and stop here — no PR for no code.

Push the branch — do not open a PR yet:

• On main (solo flow, unprotected main): git push origin main. Skip Steps 3+4 — no PR. Go to Step 5.
• On a task/*, claude/<slug>, or feature branch: git push -u origin $BRANCH. Continue.

Capture SUBJECT=$(git log -1 --format=%s) for the PR title.

Step 3 — Code review

Run @code-review against git diff HEAD~1. Capture the findings — needed for the PR body and the task block.

When addressing review findings before opening the PR: Read every file before editing it (parallel writes fail silently without a prior Read).

Step 3.5 — High-blast-radius check (does this PR want /code-review ultra?)

@code-review hunts the project's known invariants. /code-review ultra is a different tool — it launches multiple agents to audit the branch independently from different angles and filters by confidence. It is user-triggered and billed; Claude cannot launch it. Do not attempt to run it via Bash or otherwise.

Get the project's trigger table from .claude/CLAUDE-context.md under ## Blast-Radius Triggers with the Read tool — never a sed/grep one-liner. Then match the table against the branch diff (git diff $(git merge-base HEAD main)...HEAD --name-only). If that section is absent, fall back to the four generic triggers below.

The test, when a path isn't listed: does a number this code produces end up on someone's paycheck or invoice? If yes, it's the money path — whether or not a payment provider is anywhere near it. The first two rows exist separately because defining "money" by where money moves misses where it is computed: a time-clock table can land with no payment file in the diff, and a wrong timestamp, a mis-bucketed pay period, or a double-counted punch is a wrong payment that no provider-shaped trigger would ever catch.

If one or more hit, run the free local pass first, then surface the paid one. A trigger that only ever produces a suggestion to spend money produces nothing on the days you decide not to spend it — and those are exactly the PRs it fired on.

1. Run /security-review against the branch. It is local, unbilled, and aimed at this class: authorization boundaries, injection, secret handling, unsafe defaults, failure modes that fail open. This is not a duplicate of Step 3 — @code-review hunts the project's conventions and invariants; this hunts the ways a hostile or malformed input gets through. Fold its findings into the PR body under their own heading, so the reviewer can see which pass produced what.

2. Then print exactly this and continue — never block, never run the billed tool:

⚠ This PR touches: <triggers>.
  Ran /security-review (local, free) — findings above.
  `/code-review ultra` is the deeper multi-agent pass: yours to run, I can't.

Where each one earns its cost: /security-review reads the diff once, carefully. /code-review ultra fans out across several independent agents and filters by confidence, which is what catches the finding a single careful read talks itself out of. Run the local pass always on a trigger; save the billed one for a genuinely novel money or auth path, where being wrong is expensive and one reviewer's confidence is not enough.

If none hit, run nothing extra. Docs, jig, agent/skill files, dev tooling, and single-surface UI never trigger it — their blast radius stops at the dev environment.

Step 3.6 — Say what actually ran

Print this every time, including when nothing triggered. Not as a summary of findings — as a receipt of which passes happened.

Review passes:
  ✓ @code-review       — <N> findings: <one-line verdict>
  ✓ /security-review   — <N> findings: <one-line verdict>      ← only when a trigger hit
  ⊘ /security-review   — not run (no blast-radius trigger)     ← otherwise
  ⊘ /code-review ultra — never automatic; yours to invoke

Why this is its own step. With three possible passes, "no news" is ambiguous in the one direction that matters: a review that silently didn't run looks exactly like a review that ran clean. That ambiguity was already reported on the two-pass version — a ⚠ consider ultra line appeared and the operator could not tell from the output whether @code-review had run at all. Adding a third pass makes it worse unless the receipt is unconditional.

A pass that errored is ✗, not a missing line. If @code-review fails to return, or /security-review can't run, say so on its row and continue to the PR — but never let a failed pass render as a quiet absence. The whole point of the receipt is that absence is never something the reader has to infer.

Why this is a step and not a rule to remember: the trigger is a property of the diff, and the moment you'd need to recall it is the moment you're least likely to (late, task finished, PR ready). Checking the diff is reliable; remembering is not.

Step 4 — Open the PR

Resolve base branch — always the project's active trunk:

BASE=main

main is the active trunk in every project. A production branch, if the project has one, is a downstream deploy pointer advanced by /promote-production — it is never a PR base. (If a project's default branch isn't main, set BASE to that; the steady state is main.)

Step 4.0 — Resolve existing PR state for this branch

Set EXISTING_PR_STATE to one of OPEN, MERGED, CLOSED, NONE. Method 1 = gh pr view "$BRANCH" --json url,state 2>/dev/null. Method 2 = mcp__github__list_pull_requests (head: <owner>:$BRANCH, state: all). Method 3 = STOP and ask the user.

• OPEN: capture PR_URL and PR_NUMBER, skip Step 4.2 (no duplicate). Note in the task block.
• MERGED / CLOSED: unusual — this branch was already shipped. Ask the user: "Existing PR is $EXISTING_PR_STATE. Open a new PR on top? (y/n)" — if no, surface and stop; if yes, proceed to Step 4.2.
• NONE: proceed to Step 4.2.

Step 4.2 — Create the PR

Compose BODY:

## Summary One-line description.

## Files changed Bulleted list from git diff --name-only $BASE..HEAD.

## Code review Lead with the Step 3.6 receipt — which passes ran, which didn't, and why — then the findings from each, under its own sub-heading so the reviewer can tell them apart. "Clean bill of health" is a statement about a pass that ran; never write it in place of a pass that didn't.

## Test plan

Generated by you from git diff --name-only $BASE..HEAD. Always two sections, in this order and under these headings, because they answer different questions and one cannot substitute for the other:

### Verified (automated) — what you ran and what it returned. Commands and counts: the gate, the specific spec files, the new cases and what each one pins. A number that isn't in the output is a number you made up.

### Verify by hand — what the reviewer must do, because a machine did not and could not check it.

Each hand step is three things, and a step missing any of them is not a step:

1. Starting state — the route, the signed-in role, and any seed or setup command. "Open the app" is not a starting state.
2. The exact action — the control by its visible label, and the viewport if it matters. "Check the drawer works" is not an action; "at 375px, tap the ☰ button in the header" is.
3. What you should see — stated so that not seeing it is unambiguous. Where the change fixes a reported symptom, say what it did before, so the reviewer can tell a fix from a coincidence.

Close with Reset: — what to undo afterwards, or none. A reviewer who won't touch prod data because they can't tell what's reversible has been given no test plan at all.

Open the hand section with #### Setup, and make it literal. Everything below is drawn from a test plan that worked — one the operator had to ask for, which is why it is written down here instead of depending on someone thinking of it.

• The commands, in order, in one block the reviewer can paste. Not "seed the database" — the actual command names.
• Flag anything destructive on the line itself. npm run db:reset:dev # destructive: wipes your dev data is the difference between a reviewer running your plan and closing the tab.
• Name the non-obvious prerequisite, with why it's needed. The step someone will skip because nothing suggests it matters — "db:seed:crew is not optional: migration 0018 seeded a provisional admin roster and 0019 deletes it, so a freshly-migrated dev DB has zero admins and every /admin/* route renders the signed-out screen." That sentence is worth more than the rest of the setup block combined, because it is the one nobody can derive.
• Spell out how to sign in — the exact URL, the exact button label, and which identity it mints. "Sign in as an admin" is not a step if getting an admin is the hard part.
• Say what is not needed. "No Stripe, no stripe listen, no webhook — this touches no money path." A reviewer who doesn't know whether to start the payment stack will either waste ten minutes or skip the whole plan.
• Use literal values, and caveat the generated ones. Write the real dates and IDs. If the seed builds them relative to today, say so and give the anchor: "dates assume you seed on 2026-08-07 → the window is 2026-09-10 … 2026-09-16; if you seed on a different day, shift the month and keep the day-of-month."
• Carry forward a gotcha that bit last time if one applies — a leftover env var, a stale process, a cached build.

Test the abort path, not just the happy one. Where the change adds a confirm, a cancel, or a destructive action, a step that clicks Cancel and asserts nothing was written is worth more than the one that clicks OK — it is the path nobody writes a test for and the one that silently does damage when it's wrong.

A green suite never satisfies the hand section on a rendered change. This is the rule the others exist to serve, and it is written from a specific failure: a PR shipped with five numbered test-plan items — full gate green, eight new e2e cases, an entire 116-test mobile project at 375px, nine specs rerouted — and not one step a human performed. It read as thorough. Four defects reached the operator within minutes of merge: a control behind a modal backdrop, an undersized touch target, a dead-end link, and a drawer that could not be closed at 375px. Every suite was green the whole time. None of those four is a class of defect a passing test can catch, because each is a question about what a person can reach, hit, read, or escape.

So when the diff touches anything rendered, the hand section answers, in whatever form fits:

• Can you reach it? Not "is it in the DOM" — is it reachable by the path a real user takes.
• Can you operate it at 375px? Tap targets, overlap, anything behind a backdrop or off-screen.
• Can you get back out? Close, cancel, escape, back. A surface with no exit is the defect that testing-by-assertion misses most reliably.
• Does the thing you replaced still work? Whatever the change routed around, moved, or renamed.

If there is genuinely nothing to check by hand, write one line saying why — Docs only, no rendered surface, or Script change; behaviour covered by the new negative control. An absent section is indistinguishable from a forgotten one, which is the same ambiguity Step 3.6 exists to remove.

Non-UI changes still get both sections. A migration's hand step is applying it and confirming the expected shape and row counts, plus what happens to existing rows. A money-path change is reconciling an amount end to end. A capability-URL change is confirming a stale or forged token is refused.

Every number in the body says which kind it is — issue #699, PR #707, never a bare #699. Issues and PRs come from one shared GitHub counter, so they interleave and nothing in the number distinguishes them. The single exception is the closes #<issue> line, which is GitHub syntax and stops auto-closing if you prefix it. Write that one bare and say the kind in the prose around it.

Try in order:

1. gh pr create --base "$BASE" --head "$BRANCH" --title "$SUBJECT" --body "$BODY"
2. MCP mcp__github__create_pull_request fallback.
3. STOP: print body for the user to paste manually; note "PR not opened" in the task block.

Capture PR_NUMBER and PR_URL.

Step 5 — Append the task block to the session file (sessions branch)

The session file lives on the orphan sessions branch at .sessions-worktree/sessions/<file>.md. Read it first.

Compose the task block:

## Task <TASK_NUM>: <one-line title>

**Completed:**
- <bullet list of what got done, with file paths>

**Code review:** <findings summary or "Clean">
**PR:** [PR #<PR_NUMBER>](<PR_URL>)
**Points:** <effort estimate>
**Blocked:** <only if blocked>
**Branch:** <BRANCH>
**Opened at:** <ISO 8601 timestamp>

Use the Edit tool on $SESSION_FILE (the worktree path) to:

1. Append the ## Task <TASK_NUM>: block before the **Next Steps:** section near the bottom.
2. Update the frontmatter pr_numbers: list to append <PR_NUMBER>. Example: pr_numbers: [42, 43].

Then commit + push using git -C to target the worktree directory (no cd — shell state doesn't persist between Bash calls, and a stray cd that fails leaves the next command running in the wrong tree):

git -C .sessions-worktree add sessions/$(basename "$SESSION_FILE")
git -C .sessions-worktree commit -m "Session <N> — log Task <TASK_NUM> (PR #<PR_NUMBER>)"
git -C .sessions-worktree push origin sessions
git -C .sessions-worktree checkout sessions 2>/dev/null || true

The final checkout sessions re-pins the worktree HEAD to the sessions branch — guards against a detached-HEAD state if anything upstream rewrote history.

The user's main checkout never moves; the task branch stays clean (no session-file pollution).

Step 6 — Surface to the user

Task <TASK_NUM> shipped.
PR: <PR_URL>
Code review: <one-line summary>

Next: keep working in this session (cut another branch + `/kill-this` again), or run `/its-dead` to close the session.

If EXISTING_PR_STATE was OPEN and Step 4.2 was skipped, surface the existing PR URL and note that the task block now references the pre-existing PR.

Notes

• No time math, no version bump, no CHANGELOG. All deferred to /retro. This skill ships a task and logs it; that's it.
• Branch ownership. Code commits go to the current task branch. Session-file commits go to the sessions branch via the worktree. Two completely separate timelines.
• Multiple PRs per session is normal. Each /kill-this appends a ## Task <N> block; the pr_numbers: list grows. /retro reads this list to enumerate the PRs to query for merge timestamps.
• Merge ordering is free. The user can merge each PR whenever — before the next /kill-this, after /its-dead, days later. Retro reads GitHub at retro time and gets the merge timestamps regardless.
• Atomicity at /its-dead. Once /its-dead writes status: closed, the session file is never modified again. /retro reads it but only writes to RETROSPECTIVES.md and (on dev projects) to package.json / CHANGELOG.md / git tags.