Verbs

An opinionated skill pack for taking software work from ambiguity to verified delivery. Hard-won ways of working, encoded as composable skills for coding agents.

The Marketplace Plugin is the recommended Claude Code and Codex surface.
Portable hook-free skills and selective Hermes import are also supported.

Product boundary

Verbs ships skills, shared procedural primitives, dispatch, narrow host adapters, install manifests, evals, and tests. It does not own identity, context, brain or memory, project truth, runtimes, scheduling, autonomous drivers, connectors, or global model routing.

Skills

Core = markdown-first with only baseline git where declared. Ext =
needs an additional public CLI. Full spec in manifest.toml.

Skill	Tier	Purpose
`/verbs:grill`	core	Adversarial discovery, one question at a time. Drills then writes a brief + executable plan by default; say "quick" for a chat-only log.
`/verbs:careful`	core	Confirmation gate before destructive commands (prod, rm -rf, force-push).
`/verbs:debug`	core	Root-cause debugging: hypothesis → instrument → bisect → scope-blast. NOT diff review.
`/verbs:ui`	core	Build/fix UI with a point of view. NOT browser-test (qa) or render-bug (debug).
`/verbs:review`	core	Risk-adaptive diff review with scoped evidence and cold-context escalation.
`/verbs:sprint`	core	Acceptance-driven execution with bounded review and delivery evidence.
`/verbs:gatekeeper`	core	Pre-adoption trust check for external skills / MCPs / repos.
`/verbs:qa`	core	Browser-based UI QA with acceptance evidence ready for a PR.
`/verbs:ship`	ext	Test + commit + push + PR, including QA evidence comments when present. Needs cli:gh.
`/verbs:handover`	ext	Hand unfinished work to Codex (sync or async). Needs cli:codex.
`/verbs:advisor`	ext	Cross-model second opinion. Needs cli:codex and cli:claude for opposite-seat routing.

Install

Recommended: Marketplace Plugin

Claude Code:

claude plugin marketplace add panda850819/verbs --scope user
claude plugin install verbs@verbs --scope user

Codex:

codex plugin marketplace add panda850819/verbs --json
codex plugin add verbs@verbs --json

The Marketplace Plugin registers three lifecycle adapters: SessionStart
dispatch, Bash PreToolUse destructive + ticket-gate guards, and the Stop
verification gate. High-signal guard decisions append to
$XDG_STATE_HOME/verbs/guard-events.jsonl when set, otherwise
~/.local/state/verbs/guard-events.jsonl. Override the path with
VERBS_GUARD_EVENT_LOG, disable it with off, or set
VERBS_GUARD_EVENT_LEVEL=all to include routine allow decisions.

Inspect or develop locally

git clone https://github.com/panda850819/verbs.git
cd verbs
bash scripts/bootstrap.sh             # report only
bash scripts/bootstrap.sh --claude    # print Claude Code install steps
bash scripts/bootstrap.sh --codex     # print Codex CLI install steps

Work dirs (Inbox/, docs/briefs/, etc.) are auto-created on first write; you don't pre-make them.

Verify an install

claude plugin list --json
python3 scripts/verbs doctor --host claude --strict
codex plugin list --json
python3 scripts/verbs doctor --host codex --strict --live-hooks
bash scripts/conformance-smoke.sh claude   # or codex

doctor --strict compares plugin version, skill set, DISPATCH.md, and the
registered hook tree against this checkout. For a local-checkout install, use
claude plugin marketplace add "$PWD" --scope user or
codex plugin marketplace add "$PWD" --json with the same install commands
above. python3 scripts/verbs init --host <claude|codex|hermes> --dry-run
prints the local install commands without changing the host.

Manual chaining examples

Dev work: grill then sprint.

/verbs:grill "<problem>"
/verbs:sprint

Code review: review then ship.

/verbs:review
/verbs:ship

Artifacts flow between skills; you decide when to invoke each step.

Host support

Host	Status
Claude Code	Marketplace Plugin
Codex CLI	Marketplace Plugin
Hermes	Selective manual skill import

Version reset

v0.5.0 started the Verbs version line. Older v1.* tags belong to
pandastack; v4.0.0-rc.1 belongs to the short-lived product name used during
the boundary cut. Those tags and releases stay immutable history, and their
migration paths live in git history. /pandastack:* has no alias.

Development and verification

Check a checkout:

bash scripts/bootstrap.sh
python3 scripts/verbs sync --check
claude plugin validate .
bash tests/run-all.sh

Skill-writing lore for maintainers lives in
maintainer/writing-great-skills.md. It is not exposed in normal runtime
sessions.

Release

Update manifest.toml (version bump), CHANGELOG.md, and skill content on
an issue branch.
Run python3 scripts/verbs sync and bash tests/run-all.sh from a clean
commit, then merge the green PR to main.
Optionally tag vX.Y.Z and push the tag;
.github/workflows/release.yml publishes a GitHub release with generated
notes. GitHub supplies the standard source archives; no custom assets.

The version bump is what refreshes installed plugin caches; reinstall or
/reload-plugins after merging.

Roadmap

Verbs is pre-1.0 and personal-first: a public, installable skill pack whose
primary user is its author. 0.x releases may break contracts when real usage
exposes a bad boundary; breaking changes ship with migration notes in the
changelog. The work queue is limited to failures found through daily use of
the 11 active skills, Claude/Codex parity checks, and reinstall drills.

Cut v1.0.0 only when: the product identifiers and install contracts survive
two consecutive 0.x releases without a breaking rename; both hosts pass fresh
install, reinstall, cold-start invocation, and full hook registration on the
author's machines; one model-upgrade audit (capability / context / neither
recut) has run against the then-current frontier model without a load-bearing
regression; and no P0/P1 product-contract failure is open.

Out of scope: identity, personal context, brain or memory, project truth,
runtime/model selection, scheduling, autonomous drivers, connectors, global
routing, and fresh-user certification — see
.out-of-scope/ for rejected directions and their reopen
conditions.

License

MIT License. See Third-party notices for
attributions and included or adapted license terms.

Acknowledgements

Skill-writing conventions are adapted from
mattpocock/skills. See the notices for
exact attribution.