roast-gen

What This Skill Does

The roast-gen skill is a unique developer experience tool designed to audit your codebase with a mix of sharp humor and technical rigor. It parses your provided files or directories to identify anti-patterns, code smells, and questionable architectural decisions. Unlike standard static analysis tools that output dry errors, roast-gen frames its critique in a conversational, often witty tone that makes the process of refactoring more engaging. Crucially, every insult is backed by actionable, high-quality code improvements, ensuring that you walk away with a better, cleaner, and more robust codebase.

Installation

To get started, ensure you have Node.js 18 or higher installed on your machine. Because this is an OpenClaw integrated skill, you can install it seamlessly using the package manager command: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/lxgicstudios/roast-gen. Once installed, the tool becomes available as a terminal utility, allowing you to trigger roasts directly against your local workspace using standard CLI arguments. No API keys or account sign-ups are required for the base functionality.

Use Cases

• Pre-PR Review: Use this to catch obvious mistakes before opening a pull request to save your teammates' time.
• Technical Debt Assessment: Identify long-standing, "lazy" code that has been accumulating in your repository.
• Mentorship & Learning: New developers can use the tool to learn standard industry practices by seeing their mistakes highlighted and corrected.
• Humorous Team Bonding: Use it during team retrospectives to analyze legacy code and share a laugh about the "spaghetti" inherited from previous projects.

Example Prompts

• "Hey OpenClaw, run a brutal roast on my user-auth.ts file to see why my login logic is so fragile.",
• "I'm feeling brave today, roast the entire src directory in my project with the maximum intensity setting.",
• "Can you perform a mild roast on this utils file? I just want to make sure I'm not using any outdated patterns before I push to production."

Tips & Limitations

• Start Mild: If you are new to the tool, begin with the --level mild flag to calibrate your expectations. The 'brutal' mode is genuinely direct.
• Context Awareness: The tool reads local files; ensure you are running it in the correct directory. It does not store your code or send sensitive credentials to third-party APIs.
• Treat the Roast as Advice: The primary goal is improvement. Use the humor as a catalyst for discussion, but always evaluate the suggested fixes against your specific project requirements.