School of the Captain's Chest
Like the schools of the Witcher or the martial arts, each with its own stance and discipline, Captain's Chest does things its own way. This is an opinionated school of how Nicki Skipper Otte codes and works, written down as agent skills. It isn't consensus best practice; it's the house style.
Tenet 1
Vague answers get challenged until they are specific, testable, bounded and traceable. Contradictions are called out immediately, and work does not move on until each area meets the bar.
From: Project Kickoff Grill
Tenet 2
Domain logic lives in pure functions in the nearest domain-local module. Framework wiring, API calls, persistence and I/O stay at the boundaries and call into that logic.
From: Project Code Standards
Tenet 3
Artifacts are named for their responsibility, not their framework role: UserCard, not UserCardComponent; SessionStore, not a generic service. Numbers that carry meaning get a name, with units.
From: Project Code Standards
Tenet 4
Map the work areas a change touches before choosing conventions. A technology's rules apply only to work in that technology, and established conventions are kept unless a migration is in scope.
From: Project Code Standards
Tenet 5
Every project starts with a brief: at least two credible options, a chosen architecture with its consequences, a decision log of what was chosen, rejected and deferred, and scope guardrails for later.
From: Project Kickoff Grill
Tenet 6
The component is the element it represents, every clear UI region gets its own component in its own folder, Signal Forms and resources are the defaults, and icons come from the Captain's Chest Material Symbols packages.
From: Project Code Standards
Tenet 7
Make safe, relevant cleanups in the area you are already touching, keep them near the task, and track them separately from the main change, in their own commit.
From: Project Code Standards
Each skill is a folder of instructions an AI coding agent follows: a SKILL.md plus supporting files. Install them all with
npx skills@latest add captains-chest/skills --all -y Built from captains-chest/skills at fcb40fb. Credits: parts of the skills repository's agent setup (the agent docs and triage-label vocabulary) and some of its conventions are adapted from Matt Pocock's skills.