I made my coding agent explain every change to the customer. Here is the skill.
The diff is never the expensive part. The expensive part comes after: explaining to the person who asked for the change what they actually got, and discovering that "done" meant "tests pass". I spent four years as a founding engineer on a hospitality platform and then alone on a proactive assistant, and the habits that saved me the most time had nothing to do with code. Restate the request as a…
Coding agents typically handle change requests, but the real value comes from explaining the outcome to the customer and ensuring the changes behave as expected. The author spent four years building these habits before realizing they were crucial. They now bundle these habits into a skillset called "product-engineer," which comprises seven rules.
The key habits include restating the customer's request, explaining the outcome in plain language, ending commits with a customer-focused block, and confirming what was deliberately not built. The skill also mandates naming what was not shipped, using precise numbers, and speaking the stakeholder's language. There are now four versions of this skill: one for product engineers, one for customers, one for release notes, and one for AI agents that write about software.
Installing the skill is straightforward, and it can be used as a plugin in various coding agents. The skill enforces the rules through a commit message check, ensuring any commit adheres to the seven rules. The author tested the skill across multiple coding tasks and found that using the skill significantly improved the quality of the customer block, what was built, and what was not built.
While the skill does make coding tasks take slightly longer, it ensures a higher quality outcome and better communication with the customer.
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