code-standards-detective

What This Skill Does

The Code Standards Detective is an analytical engine designed to reverse-engineer the unspoken rules of a codebase. Unlike traditional linting tools that enforce a rigid, pre-defined set of rules, this skill performs statistical analysis on existing code to reveal the de facto standards that have emerged over time. It identifies patterns in naming conventions, import structures, function architecture, and type usage. By treating your repository as a dataset, it provides evidence-based insights with confidence intervals, allowing teams to distinguish between desired coding standards and the actual reality of the codebase. It generates comprehensive, human-readable documentation that serves as a living style guide, helping onboard new developers and align long-term maintenance efforts.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw command-line interface. Run the following command in your terminal within your OpenClaw-enabled project:

clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/anton-abyzov/sw-code-standards-detective

Ensure that you have appropriate repository permissions, as the skill will need read access to your source code and configuration files to perform its analysis effectively.

Use Cases

• Legacy Code Onboarding: Rapidly understand how a legacy project is structured before beginning a refactor.
• PR Review Standardization: Establish clear project expectations to reduce bike-shedding during code reviews.
• Technical Debt Assessment: Quantify the spread of anti-patterns like excessive 'any' usage or inconsistent error handling across a large repository.
• Architecture Audits: Verify whether imports are following the defined architectural layers (e.g., ensuring feature-based isolation).

Example Prompts

1. "Run a code standards analysis on the /src directory and generate a report on our variable naming and function patterns."
2. "Detect any prevalent anti-patterns in our error handling logic and identify where we are violating our tsconfig strictness settings."
3. "Analyze the current import structure of our project and suggest improvements based on the existing pattern of external versus relative imports."

Tips & Limitations

• Tip: Always run this tool after a clean git checkout to ensure the analysis reflects the latest commit.
• Tip: If your project is massive, target specific sub-directories to stay within token budgets.
• Limitation: The tool relies on grep and pattern matching; it does not perform deep AST analysis, so it may miss highly complex, non-standard code structures.
• Limitation: Accuracy depends on the sample size; very small modules may provide statistically insignificant results.