Skill System

Uncle Bob is a catalog of focused skills. Each skill is an operating contract that helps an agent handle one kind of work better: planning, governance, authoring, quality review, customization, or implementation in a specific technology.

Mental Model

Think of the system as layers:

1. ub-quality is the companion baseline.
2. Routing and control skills shape the work.
3. Implementation specialists apply only when their domain is active.

What A Skill Changes

A skill changes the agent’s behavior by giving it:

• activation boundaries
• task-specific workflow
• validation expectations
• examples of what to do and what to avoid
• deeper references when the task needs more detail

The skill does not replace project truth. It tells the agent how to inspect the project and make better choices from the real context in front of it.

Inline And Forked Context

By default, a skill loads inline: its main instructions and any triggered references become part of the parent agent's working context.

Some VS Code hosts also support an experimental forked mode with context: fork in SKILL.md. In that mode, the skill runs in a dedicated subagent context and returns only its final result to the parent agent.

Uncle Bob treats forked context as a targeted optimization for heavy, report-oriented skills. It is useful when the skill reads many files or large references and produces a focused decision, audit, or summary. It is a poor fit for companion baselines such as ub-quality, workflow state management such as ub-workflow, or implementation specialists whose rules need to keep shaping follow-up edits in the parent context.

References And Progressive Disclosure

Most skills keep their main SKILL.md concise and place deeper patterns in skill-owned references. The agent should load those references only when their trigger applies: a migration guide for migration work, a validation reference for gate work, or a config-resolution reference for setup work.

See References And Progressive Disclosure for the public mental model.

Common Combinations

• ub-quality + ub-workflow: planning or delivery work.
• ub-quality + ub-governance: risk, evidence, or testing posture.
• ub-authoring + ub-customizations: building reusable agent guidance.
• ub-ts + ub-vuejs: Vue implementation with TypeScript contracts.
• ub-nuxt + ub-tailwind: Nuxt app structure plus Tailwind integration.