Jon's personal shelf of Cursor agent skills. Workflow patterns, planning skills, and engineering practices I use day-to-day, scrubbed of work-specific context and shared publicly.
Skills here are alpha — I've authored them, I use them at work, but they don't carry a stability contract. I'm sharing them because they might save someone else the time of writing the same thing, not because I claim they're polished.
This follows Simon Willison's "alpha" convention for AI-assisted code: things can look polished — tests, docs, a real README — without being proven. The signal of quality is that someone has used the skill for real work. Each skill below has been used by me in real Cursor sessions; I can't promise it'll work the same way for you.
The implicit contract: "Jon uses this. He hasn't hardened it for others. Read the SKILL.md, copy what makes sense, adjust paths, fix anything broken."
A skill is a markdown file (SKILL.md) plus optional supporting files that the Cursor agent loads when the user invokes it (e.g. /grill-me or /scaffold-workspace). Skills live at ~/.cursor/skills/<skill-name>/SKILL.md. The agent reads the file and follows the workflow described inside.
For more on the format, see Anthropic's skills repo and Simon Willison's notes on skills.
| Skill | Purpose |
|---|---|
tdd-pocock/ |
Test-driven development with red-green-refactor. Adapted from Matt Pocock's TDD skill (MIT-licensed; see tdd-pocock/ATTRIBUTION.md). Includes companion docs on mocking, deep modules, interface design, refactoring, and tests. |
code-review/ |
Seven-phase code review checklist (architecture, collaboration, naming, errors, tests, frontend, commits) with a 0–3 per-phase scoring rubric. |
grill-me/ |
Stress-test a plan or design through a relentless interview until shared understanding is reached. |
improve-codebase-architecture/ |
Explore a codebase for architectural friction, find coupling, propose module-deepening refactors. Includes a REFERENCE.md with the conceptual framework. |
extract-engineering-style/ |
Mine git history (and optionally MR comments) to extract coding conventions and review voice for named engineers. |
generate-skill-doc/ |
Turn a debugging or investigation session into a structured codebase skill doc for future engineers and LLMs. |
continue-workflow/ |
Resume a previous working session by finding and loading the most recent continuation prompt. |
close-out-session/ |
Wrap up a session — summarize progress, capture uncommitted changes, write a continuation prompt, commit. |
scaffold-workspace/ |
Create a new project workspace folder with workbench, worktree, Cursor rules, and .code-workspace file. |
scaffold-docs-folder/ |
Create a new project folder or subfolder inside a documentation repo with README scaffolding and index updates. |
structured-backlog/ |
Decompose a plan into structured backlog task files with acceptance criteria and TDD workflows. Includes a task template. |
prd-to-issues/ |
Break a PRD into independently-grabbable issues using tracer-bullet vertical slices. |
enforce-integration-test/ |
Plan and validate end-to-end integration tests before running them. Prevents mock-heavy tests from masquerading as integration tests. |
playwright-capture-flow/ |
Capture an MCP-driven Playwright exploration as a reusable script. |
setup-nvim-tmux/ |
Replicate my Neovim + tmux dev environment on a new macOS machine. |
gh-pr-create/ |
Recipe-style skill for opening clean GitHub PRs via the gh CLI: draft-first, body-from-file, structured template. |
full-path-github/ |
Confidence-gated orchestrator that takes a GitHub issue and delivers a reviewed, tested draft PR. Composes grill-me, structured-backlog, tdd-pocock, code-review, and gh-pr-create. Designed for personal projects. |
Each skill is a folder. Cursor loads skills from ~/.cursor/skills/<name>/SKILL.md.
git clone git@github.com:jwrobes/skills.git ~/personal/skills
cd ~/personal/skills
# Symlink an individual skill
ln -s "$(pwd)/grill-me" ~/.cursor/skills/grill-me
# Or symlink all of them
./install.shinstall.sh symlinks every skill folder in this repo into ~/.cursor/skills/. It refuses to overwrite existing folders or symlinks (run with --force to overwrite).
If you want to fork a skill and own your version, just copy the folder into ~/.cursor/skills/ and edit. There's no runtime dependency on this repo.
These skills exist in my local toolkit but aren't published yet. Each requires more than a textual scrub:
playwright-send-message— a Playwright wrapper for a specific Rails-app messaging flow at work. Not generic; would need to be re-authored as a "playwright wrapper template" skill rather than scrubbed.draft-gitlab-issue— heavily GitLab-flavored. Plan is to generalize into adraft-issueskill that handles GitHub and GitLab, or split intodraft-github-issueanddraft-gitlab-issuewith a shared core.full-path-orchestrator(GitLab variant) — the GitLab-flavored sibling offull-path-github. Stays internal; the public version here isfull-path-github.
The migration plan for these and future skills lives in my private docs (gist of it: pure copies, scrub on publish, no symlinks back to source).
For runnable tools (CLI utilities, browser HTML tools, scripts), see jwrobes/workshop. Skills here that teach the agent how to use a tool travel with that tool — they live inside the tool's folder in the workshop repo.
MIT — see LICENSE. Use, fork, modify, redistribute. Attribution appreciated but not required.
- Simon Willison's tools repo — the alpha convention and the "personal-shelf-shared-publicly" pattern.
- Anthropic's skills repo — the canonical reference for skill format.