7 Agent Skills for Engineering Work Coding Agents Miss

AI coding agents can rapidly implement requests but often overlook planning, contract preservation, behavior definition, failure handling, developer experience, and documentation, prompting Nnenna Ndukwe to open-source seven reusable Qodo Agent Skills that make these engineering tasks explicit. The skills span the delivery lifecycle: software-build-plan creates evidence-based, read-only implementation plans; tdd-bdd defines observable behavior through failing tests; workflow-invariants models safe and blocked state transitions; failure-path-testing verifies that unsafe progression, partial writes, and malformed inputs are prevented with actionable recovery guidance; dx-audit evaluates changed developer-facing interfaces; readme-audit identifies documentation drift; and readme-creation produces authorized, evidence-based README updates. Each skill has a narrow responsibility, distinguishes inspection from permission to modify files, prioritizes repository evidence over generic advice, and requires unverified runtime, review, or external-state gaps to remain visible. A ThreadLoop safety-workflow example combined five skills to improve diagnostics when setup or verification mutated a repository while preserving receipt schemas and ensuring later execution remained blocked, with tests and an independent Qodo review providing separate forms of assurance. The proposed approach encourages teams to select the smallest combination of skills needed for a change, arguing that sustainable AI-assisted development depends not only on faster code generation but also on workflows that can explain, test, review, and defend the resulting software.

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