Does Claude Code Always Make You Re-explain Engineering Standards? This Open-Source Skill Aims to Package Them—But There’s a Priority Pitfall

Every time you start a new Claude Code session, you have to repeat your code standards, testing requirements, and review criteria all over again. Dan Kornas, the poster, is tired of this too. He recommends a Claude Code skill called senior-engineering-partner, by Brian Greenberg, open-sourced under Apache-2.0.

It’s not a prompt template. According to the tweet, it packages a spec → plan → TDD → verify workflow into reusable instructions, and includes several task modes: REVIEW, DEBUG, EXPLAIN, AUDIT. You can switch among review, debugging, teaching, and report-first auditing. Testing and verification depth scales by phase, from prototype to production, but security fundamentals remain in place.

One practical part is on-demand loading of references. Standards for Python, Bash, JavaScript/TypeScript, Swift, cloud infrastructure, and more are not all stuffed into context at once; they load only when relevant. There’s also a custom environment profile: put your own stack and conventions in a separate gitignored file, without modifying the core skill. It also ships with dependency audit scripts, a self-check checklist, regression scenarios, and a CLI evaluator.

There’s a detail worth noting in the replies. One user asked whether standards can be edited per project. Another user, Miloš van DotNET, replied that if you put a tuned copy in each repository, be careful: when a skill with the same name exists in both ~/.claude/skills and the project’s .claude/skills, Claude Code runs the one in the personal directory and ignores the repository version. That’s a pitfall for team-shared configuration.

Another user asked: Is this skill loaded in every session, or only when a task matches? If it stays resident in context, how long is it? When it conflicts with the repository’s own CLAUDE.md, which one wins? The tweet doesn’t answer these one by one. Judging from the 'on-demand reference loading' design, it probably isn’t fully resident all the time, but you’ll need to test the actual behavior yourself.

If you already use Claude Code to write code and don’t want to explain engineering standards from scratch every time, this skill is worth a look. The GitHub repo is in the replies: https://github.com/bjgreenberg/senior-engineering-partner. Original tweet: https://x.com/DanKornas/status/2117563941421289733.