Utility Skills
Beyond the Society's 19 members: specialist skills for tasks no member owns.
The Skills Reference documents the Society members — the 19 roles the runtime can invoke with npx agenthood run. This page documents the utility skills: specialist capability files that any agent runtime loads from skills/, ported from the GitHub Copilot customization library and the deepagents project. They have no runtime invocation (they are not registered members) — they activate when their description matches the task at hand.
Teaching & Explaining
Concept Explainer
Every concept has a simple core buried under jargon.
What it does: Breaks down complex technical concepts in beginner-friendly ways — everyday analogies first, terminology second, working examples always, with comprehension checks before moving on.
When to use: Explaining a technical topic to a learner, onboarding someone into unfamiliar code, writing educational documentation, answering "why does this work" with more than a one-liner.
File: skills/concept-explainer/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Librarian (documentation) — the Explainer teaches, the Librarian records.
Debugging Tutor
The measure of success is whether the learner can fix the next one without help.
What it does: Teaches systematic debugging as a skill: consistent reproduction, careful error-message reading, one change at a time, hypothesis formation, and pattern recognition — through leading questions rather than handed answers.
When to use: A learner is stuck on a bug and needs to build independent problem-solving skill, or a team repeatedly hits the same error categories.
File: skills/debugging-tutor/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Debugger (diagnosis) and The Bug Fix Teammate (remediation) — the Tutor builds the skill, the others do the work.
Onboarding Planner
Foundation, exploration, integration — a path from first day to first contribution.
What it does: Creates personalized phased onboarding plans — environment setup with troubleshooting, codebase discovery with beginner-friendly first tasks, and team-process integration through early wins.
When to use: A new team member joins, a developer arrives with an unfamiliar stack, or onboarding documentation needs structure.
File: skills/onboarding-plan/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Librarian (docs) and The Concept Explainer (learning material).
Planning & Building
Implementation Planner
Planning exists to surface contradictions cheaply — before code, not during it.
What it does: Turns a feature into a phased roadmap: problem and success criteria, technical approach with trade-offs, phases (foundation → core functionality → polish & deploy) with per-task complexity estimates and dependencies, plus assumptions, constraints, risks, and an explicit out-of-scope list.
When to use: Before starting a non-trivial feature, when a task needs phases and dependencies, or when a plan must be written down for a team to follow.
File: skills/implementation-planner/SKILL.md
Relation: Sits between The Strategist (goal refinement) and The Architect (specs/ADRs) — more tactical than the Strategist, less formal than the Architect.
Bug Fix Teammate
Fix the reported issue completely. Refactor nothing else.
What it does: The remediation arm of debugging — scans for the most critical bugs, prioritizes by impact, reproduces and roots them, implements the minimal working fix, adds regression tests, and shares the knowledge gained.
When to use: A bug needs a complete fix with tests rather than a diagnosis, or the codebase needs bug triage.
File: skills/bug-fix-teammate/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Debugger (diagnoses) and The Builder (implements) — action-oriented bug resolution with teaching.
Cleanup Specialist
Simplifies safely. Nothing observable changes.
What it does: Removes dead code, consolidates duplication, simplifies messy patterns, and applies consistent formatting across code and documentation — one improvement at a time, tested before and after, never adding features.
When to use: A file, directory, or codebase has accumulated dead code or duplication and needs maintainability work without behavior change.
File: skills/cleanup-specialist/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Warden (detects smells) — the Warden reports, the Specialist remediates.
GitHub Workflow
Issue Manager
An issue that requires a follow-up conversation to understand has failed.
What it does: Turns vague complaints into workable tickets — bug report essentials (reproduction steps, expected vs actual, environment), structured feature requests (problem, use cases, success criteria), and triage best practices (labels, linking, clarifying questions).
When to use: Filing bug reports or feature requests, triaging an issue queue, or teaching contributors to write actionable issues.
File: skills/issue-manager/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Doorman (standards enforcement) and The Scribe (communication) — no lane overlap.
Pull Request Assistant
A PR is a contract between author and reviewers — draft it well, enforce it fairly.
What it does: Generates complete PR descriptions (what/why/testing/breaking changes), runs review passes across security, performance, testing, and documentation, checks deployment requirements (migrations, env vars, feature flags), and formats feedback with issue/suggestion/why and emoji labels.
When to use: Opening a PR that needs a complete description, or reviewing one before merge.
File: skills/pull-request-assistant/SKILL.md
Relation: Overlaps The Scribe (PR descriptions) and The Reviewer (multi-axis review) — this is the combined, template-driven variant; the members remain canonical for runtime use.
Quality
Accessibility Auditor
A page that only works with a mouse is a page that does not work.
What it does: Audits web interfaces against WCAG — semantic HTML first, ARIA requirements, keyboard navigation with visible focus, contrast ratios (4.5:1 text / 3:1 large text and UI), screen reader compatibility, accessible forms, and automated plus manual testing integration.
When to use: Generating or reviewing HTML, auditing an interface against accessibility standards, or designing forms and dynamic content.
File: skills/accessibility-auditor/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Auditor (security) — a specialized, WCAG-focused review lane.
Memory
Rememberer
Preferences in memory, processes in skills. Unclassified knowledge is unfindable knowledge.
What it does: Scans conversation history, classifies learnings (best practices, anti-patterns, conventions, decision rationale) into memory entries for guidelines or skill files for reusable workflows, and summarizes what was captured and where.
When to use: "Remember this", "save what we learned", "update memory", or "capture learnings" — any session that produced knowledge worth keeping.
File: skills/remember/SKILL.md
Relation: Complements The Librarian (knowledge management) — the Rememberer captures from sessions, the Librarian curates the corpus.
Related
- Skills Reference — the 19 Society members and their invocation
- Built-in Tools — canonical tool registry with scoping
- Getting Started — install and first workflow
One Society. Every member knows their lane — and every skill knows its task.