Stack Minimality Help

Purpose

Provide a one-shot reference to the stack-minimality pack and its relationship to domain skills.

Activate when

Use for minimality help, skill selection, pack usage, or a request for simplification commands.

Repository inspection

No scan is required unless the user asks for a repository-specific example.

Decision rules

Select the narrowest skill:

• stack-minimality: implementation discipline;
• stack-minimality-review: focused diff over-engineering review;
• stack-minimality-audit: whole-repository simplification audit;
• stack-minimality-debt: deliberate shortcut ledger;
• stack-minimality-evidence: observable measurement;
• stack-minimality-help: this reference.

The domain skill still owns the engineering contract. Minimality never overrides explicit requirements or required guarantees.

Implementation procedure

Pair stack-minimality with the skill that owns the actual problem, such as Rails persistence, Rails jobs, React state, TypeScript runtime contracts, PostgreSQL schema engineering, security, or API design.

Anti-patterns / failure modes

• Treating minimality as a replacement for correctness or security review.
• Optimizing for character count instead of smallest safe implementation.
• Publishing unmeasured benchmark results.
• Using review or audit skills to modify the repository.

Reference example

$ bin/stack-minimality help
Usage: bin/stack-minimality <command> [repository]

Commands:
  help       Show this reference.
  debt       List stack-minimality: shortcut markers.
  evidence   Report observable Git diff size for a repository.

Typical selection: implementing a change → stack-minimality with the owning domain skill; reviewing a diff for over-engineering → stack-minimality-review; listing deliberate shortcuts → stack-minimality-debt (bin/stack-minimality debt); measuring a simplification → stack-minimality-evidence (bin/stack-minimality evidence).

Agent review checklist

• Correct minimality skill selected.
• Domain skill remains responsible for the contract.
• Non-negotiable guarantees preserved.
• Report-only skills did not modify source.

Verification

Confirm that the requested skill operated at the correct scope and that report-only activity left files unchanged.

Source foundation

• https://ponytail.dev/
• https://github.com/DietrichGebert/ponytail
• Repository routing and skill-pack conventions