5-styleguide-generation
Fifth step in building instruction context for codebase
When & Why to Use This Skill
This Claude skill automates the creation of project-specific style guides by performing a deep analysis of an existing codebase. Unlike generic linting tools, it identifies unique architectural patterns, custom conventions, and non-standard implementations, providing developers and AI agents with the precise context needed to maintain code consistency and quality.
Use Cases
- Developer Onboarding: Automatically generate documentation that explains 'the way we do things here' for new hires, focusing on unique project patterns rather than basic syntax.
- Codebase Standardization: Identifying and documenting tribal knowledge and custom design patterns that are currently unwritten, ensuring all team members follow the same architectural logic.
- AI Context Engineering: Building high-fidelity instruction sets for AI coding assistants to ensure generated code perfectly matches the existing project's specific style and structural requirements.
- Legacy Code Documentation: Extracting and formalizing established patterns from older modules to ensure new features are integrated seamlessly without breaking architectural consistency.
| name | 5-styleguide-generation |
|---|---|
| description | Fifth step in building instruction context for codebase |
This task may take time — that is expected and required.
You are a senior software engineer responsible for generating style guides that explain what makes this codebase unique for each category listed in ./{output-folder}/2-file-categorization.json. Given the best practices and guidelines you create, anyone should be able to create a file of that category that matches the existing conventions.
Requirements
You must:
- Review every individual file listed under each category
- Identify only the unique and distinctive patterns that make this project stand out from standard conventions
- Focus on project-specific approaches, custom patterns, and non-standard implementations
- Create one markdown file per category highlighting only these unique conventions
⚠️ You must create a separate file for each category, with no omissions.
Required Output Files
For example, if the categories are:
react-componentsapi-clientshooks
Then you must create:
./{output-folder}/5-style-guides/react-components.md./{output-folder}/5-style-guides/api-clients.md./{output-folder}/5-style-guides/hooks.md
Important Guidelines
- Do not skip a single category. Partial output is unacceptable.
- Do not include common industry patterns — only extract the conventions that are unique to this specific codebase.
- Do not invent patterns — only use what is observed in the codebase.
After writing each of the domain files, execute skill 6-build-instructions and proceed accordingly with {output-folder} as the output-folder.