German Technical Writing Skill

Natural German technical register for Jira comments and descriptions, internal German-language wiki/spec pages, and team-chat messages to German-speaking colleagues.

Catches literal English→German anglicisms (brechen, gefangen, returnen, triggern, failen) and substitutes the canonical technical lexicon (werfen, abfangen, zurückgeben, auslösen, fehlschlagen) while accepting ecosystem-standard Denglisch loanwords (der Commit, die Pipeline, die Exception).

🔌 Compatibility

This is an Agent Skill following the open standard originally developed by Anthropic and released for cross-platform use.

Supported Platforms:

• ✅ Claude Code (Anthropic)
• ✅ Cursor
• ✅ GitHub Copilot
• ✅ Other skills-compatible AI agents

Skills are portable packages of procedural knowledge that work across any AI agent supporting the Agent Skills specification.

Features

• Anti-pattern detection: ~60 false-friends catalogued — brechen, gefangen, returnen, failen, triggern, hitten, plus calqued idioms (am Ende des Tages, Low-hanging Fruit) and pseudo-anglicisms (Handy, Beamer)
• Technical lexicon: preferred German forms with gender for Exceptions, Tests, Git, CI/CD, HTTP, Frontend, Data, and Architecture domains
• Register enforcement: Präsens-Indikativ default, impersonal voice, no first-person in artifacts, sentence-length and compound-noun rules
• Artifact-specific conventions: Jira ticket descriptions, Jira comments, internal German wiki/spec pages
• Worked examples: 6 paired bad-vs-good cases with annotations

Installation

Marketplace (Recommended)

Add the Netresearch marketplace once, then browse and install skills:

# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add netresearch/claude-code-marketplace
/plugin install german-technical-writing

npx (skills.sh)

Install with any Agent Skills-compatible agent:

npx skills add https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill --skill german-technical-writing

Download Release

Download the latest release and extract to your agent's skills directory.

Git Clone

git clone https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill.git

Composer (PHP Projects)

composer require netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill

Requires netresearch/composer-agent-skill-plugin.

npm (Node Projects)

npm install --save-dev \
  @netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator \
  github:netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill

Requires @netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator, which discovers the skill in node_modules and registers it in AGENTS.md via a postinstall hook. For pnpm, also allowlist the coordinator's postinstall:

{
  "pnpm": {
    "onlyBuiltDependencies": ["@netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator"]
  }
}

Usage

The skill triggers automatically when composing German prose longer than one sentence for a German-audience artifact — Jira tickets and comments, internal German wiki/spec pages, or team-chat messages to German-speaking colleagues.

Example queries:

• "schreib bitte einen Jira-Kommentar auf OROSPD-692: der cart-merge-on-login Test failt weil ..."
• "HMKG-2202 ticket beschreibung muss neu geschrieben werden — problem/ziel format auf deutsch"
• "kurze Slack-Ankündigung ans HMKG team auf deutsch: Pipeline CI-383 ist grün"
• "drei-satz blurb auf deutsch fürs internal-wiki über das MeyerBaselineBundle"

The skill does not trigger for commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes (all English at Netresearch and most agencies delivering customer projects), conversational chat replies, single-word acknowledgements, or English artifacts that happen to contain German identifiers.

Structure

skills/german-technical-writing/
├── SKILL.md              # Trigger description, process, top-anti-pattern table
├── references/
│   ├── anti-patterns.md  # ~60 false-friends catalogue with explanations
│   ├── lexicon.md        # Technical term lexicon with gender
│   ├── register.md       # Tense/voice/person, artifact conventions
│   └── examples.md       # 6 paired real-world cases with annotations
└── evals/
    └── evals.json        # 15 trigger-eval queries with assertions

Contributing

Issues and pull requests welcome at https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill/issues.

When proposing new anti-pattern entries or lexicon additions, please include:

1. The English concept
2. The literal-translation form to avoid
3. The preferred technical German form
4. A brief explanation of why the literal form reads as anglicism

See skills/german-technical-writing/references/examples.md for the style of explanation we expect.

License

• Code (composer.json, plugin.json, configs): MIT
• Prose (SKILL.md, references, README): CC-BY-SA-4.0