constraint-driven-development
An agent skill by addyosmani, from addyosmani/agent-skills. Tags: debugging, developer-tools, documents.
What it does
Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on which dimensions matter, supplies sane default thresholds when they have no number in mind, records everything in CONSTRAINTS.md, and watches the diff for a weakened bar — new @ts-ignore or eslint-disable suppressions, skipped or deleted tests, assertions stripped out, unimplemented stubs, thresholds edited down. Use when no quality bar is written down, when the user says "set up constraints" or "define our standards", when the user wants dimensions they care about — accessibility, web performance, coverage — set up as enforced constraints, when an agent keeps silencing checks or skipping tests to get to green, when you need a coverage or performance threshold and don't know what number to pick, or when an agent writes more code than anyone will read.
Install
With the skills CLI, which installs into Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and other agents:
npx skills add addyosmani/agent-skills --skill constraint-driven-developmentOr copy the skill folder into Claude Code's skills directory by hand (~/.claude/skills for every project, or .claude/skills inside one):
git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/addyosmani/agent-skills
cp -r agent-skills/skills/constraint-driven-development ~/.claude/skills/constraint-driven-developmentSafety box score
Not rated yet. A safety box score grades what a skill and its scripts can reach on the machine of whoever installs it, across eight categories from shell execution to secrets access. Anyone can request one from this page; it is saved for everyone. How the score works.
Source
- Repository
- addyosmani/agent-skills (all skills from this repository)
- Path
- skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md
- Branch
- main
- Updated
- 2026-09-19
Related skills
- code-review-and-quality — Conducts multi-axis code review. Use before merging any change. Use when reviewing code written by yourself, another agent, or a human.
- deprecation-and-migration — Manages deprecation and migration. Use when removing old systems, APIs, or features. Use when migrating users from one implementation to another.
- doubt-driven-development — Subjects every non-trivial decision to a fresh-context adversarial review before it stands.
- archify-review — Review Archify issues, PRs, or code through value, cost, and impact to support evidence-based maintenance decisions.
- intended-vs-implemented — The method for finding the gap between what a system is supposed to do and what the code actually does — the class of bug generic scanners miss because they.
- obsidian-cli — Interact with Obsidian vaults using the Obsidian CLI to read, create, search, and manage notes, tasks, properties, and more.