discover-substrate

What problem does it solve?

When preparing to modify a codebase, teams often lack a clear inventory of existing specifications, named invariants, gotchas, semantic linters, and enforcement mechanisms, leading to broken behavior, duplicated work, and lost institutional knowledge. This skill eliminates that guesswork by systematically surfacing what substrate already exists and what is missing for the exact change surface you are about to touch.

Core Features & Use Cases

• Structured Substrate Inventory: Runs a bounded scan to categorize all existing normative docs, behavior matrices, invariants, gotchas, tests, CI checks, and custom linters for your target change surface.
• Concrete Gap Identification: Surfaces missing memory with file:line evidence, so you can address critical gaps before writing code rather than fixing regressions after.
• Cross-Skill Integration: Serves as the mandatory first step for internal Cohesive workflows including brainstorm-design, audit-substrate, review-codebase, and review-diff, or can be invoked directly for a standalone substrate inventory.
• Use Case Example: Before rewriting the payment processing spec, run this skill to confirm all existing invariants around transaction idempotency and audit logging are captured, and flag any missing test coverage for edge cases.

Quick Start

Use the discover-substrate skill to inventory all existing specs, invariants, and gotchas for the payment processing subsystem before planning a refactor.