What problem does it solve?
Projects frequently drift from their original intent when there is no single, canonical statement of purpose and explicit non-goals to guide contributions. Without this anchor, team members extrapolate conflicting goals from existing code, scope creeps into PRs without review, dependencies accumulate without justification, and bounded contexts blur as the project grows, leading to wasted effort and reduced conceptual integrity.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Canonical Purpose Guidance: Provides principles for defining and maintaining a single source of truth for project purpose, goals, and non-goals across READMEs, dedicated purpose documents, or ADRs.
- Scope Drift Prevention: Includes red flags, rationalization counterpoints, and review guardrails to catch unplanned scope expansion, mixed-change PRs, and undocumented scope shifts.
- Alignment Enforcement: Ensures plans, PRs, and new dependencies all trace back to stated user needs and project goals, eliminating unanchored work.
- Use Case: A team maintaining a multi-service open source monorepo can use this skill to review incoming PRs, confirm new dependencies are justified against the project's stated purpose, and catch attempts to add out-of-scope features to individual services.
Quick Start
Use the purpose-and-scope skill to audit your project's README and recent PRs to confirm all work aligns with the documented project purpose and non-goals.
