What problem does it solve?
Managing major version updates of devDependencies in a JavaScript monorepo is high-risk: uncoordinated updates can break builds, introduce hard-to-trace regressions, and create commit histories that are impossible to bisect when issues arise.
Core Features & Use Cases
- Logical dependency grouping: Automatically clusters coupled packages (e.g. all @babel/* scoped packages) into single update sets to avoid partial, broken dependency states.
- Breakage risk assessment: Evaluates each group's risk level based on its role in the build pipeline, real usage breadth across the codebase, changelog red flags, and compatibility with the active Node.js runtime.
- Test-gated safe commits: Only creates a signed commit for a group if the build and all tests pass, never pushes changes automatically, and pauses for user confirmation on medium or high-risk updates.
Use Case: A team maintaining the makeup-js monorepo can use this skill to safely upgrade @babel/core from v7 to v8, with all related Babel packages updated together, full test validation, and a single revertable commit if any issues are found.
Quick Start
Invoke the update-major-deps skill with the argument 'all' to process every available major devDependency update in the monorepo, with automatic risk assessment and test gating for each group.
