How to Write Skills

In River Review, checks for each phase are added as "skills". Skills are defined using YAML frontmatter + Markdown and must comply with schemas/skill.schema.json.

Basic Rules

• Focus on one perspective per skill (e.g., security, performance, pre-release checks).
• Required fields: id / name / description / phase / applyTo.
• Set phase to upstream, midstream, or downstream, and match the directory structure (e.g., skills/midstream/).

Sample

---
id: architecture
name: Architecture Consistency Check
description: Verify alignment with ADRs and design guides in the upstream phase.
phase: upstream
applyTo:
  - 'docs/adr/**/*.md'
severity: major
tags: [architecture, decision-record]
---

- Verify that changes do not contradict existing ADRs.
- If a new decision is needed, prompt the creation of an ADR draft.
- Check if the impact scope and risks are explicitly stated.

After saving, you can run scripts/rr_validate_skills.py --phase upstream to perform schema validation and phase-specific loading.