constraint-driven-development from nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on which dimensions matter, supplies sane default thresholds when they have no number in mind, records everything in CONSTRAINTS.md, and watches the diff for a weakened bar — new @ts-ignore or eslint-disable suppressions, skipped or deleted tests, assertions stripped out, unimplemented stubs, thresholds edited down. Use when no quality bar is written down, when the user says…
Collected from public GitHub. Every version is saved exactly as it was and never changes. Install it at an exact version with the mdr tool, and every file is checked before it reaches your agent. The main file is checked against the SHA-256 fingerprint recorded here, and the others against the fingerprints GitHub keeps for its source commit. The automatic checks below grade the latest version, and the same checks always give the same file the same grade.
What the file says
# Constraint-Driven Development
## Overview
Other skills in this pack describe what good looks like. `code-review-and-quality` gives you five axes. `test-driven-development` gives you a cycle. `security-and-hardening` gives you a threat list. All of that lives in prose the agent reads and may or may not follow, and none of it survives the end of the session.
This skill produces something different: a written record of **this project's** bar, with numbers, that outlives the conversation and can be checked mechanically.
The reason matters. When you wrote the code, reading it told you whether it was any good. An agent writes more in an afternoon than you will read that week, so the judgement moves out of your head and into checks that run around the loop. Those checks need to exist, they need numbers you actually chose, and they need to fire close enough to the work that the agent fixes its own output.
Spec-driven development says what to build. Test-driven development proves it works. Constraint-driven development defines what "good enough to ship" means, before anyone argues about it in a pull request.
## When to Use
Apply this skill when:
…
The line at the top of this page pins the label git:20260916.3a6b22e, which is what most people want. This one pins the sha256 fingerprint of the contents instead, so it survives a label being moved. Either way the exact version is written to mdr.lock, and mdr install downloads and checks those contents again, so it installs them exactly or stops with an error.
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_3bo57py4lajxmjdn
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles/constraint-driven-development
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/06479d4305f286d23cfb99f5dc85695896785269664e1f6a8d800e3b71e70c10
Your AI assistant does the legwork. You hear about the deals worth your word. Hand yours the standing instructions at modelranch.com and it joins the network that reads files like this one.
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/api-and-interface-design/SKILL.md · Guides stable API and interface design. Use when designing APIs,
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/browser-testing-with-devtools/SKILL.md · Tests in real browsers via Chrome DevTools MCP. Use when building
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/ci-cd-and-automation/SKILL.md · Automates CI/CD pipeline setup. Use when setting up or modifying
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/code-review-and-quality/SKILL.md · Conducts multi-axis code review. Use before merging any change. Use
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/code-simplification/SKILL.md · Simplifies code for clarity. Use when refactoring code for clarity
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/context-engineering/SKILL.md · Optimizes agent context setup. Use when starting a new session,
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/deprecation-and-migration/SKILL.md · Manages deprecation and migration. Use when removing old systems,
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/documentation-and-adrs/SKILL.md · Records decisions and documentation. Use when you need to document
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/doubt-driven-development/SKILL.md · Subjects every non-trivial decision to a fresh-context adversarial
addyosmani/agent-skills · skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on…
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-codex/.agents/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on…
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-claude/.claude/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-cursor/.cursor/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on…
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-forgecat/platforms/cursor/.cursor/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on…
nota-america/forgecat-agent-profiles · profiles/addyosmani/agent-skills/for-forgecat/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Establishes a project's quality bar as a written contract and stops agents quietly lowering it. Interviews the user on…
outlinedriven/outline-driven-development · .devin/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Use when asked to implement under non-negotiable constraints: performance budgets, platform limits, legal or API rules…
outlinedriven/odin-claude-plugin · plugins/odin-code/skills/constraint-driven-development/SKILL.md · Use when asked to implement under non-negotiable constraints: performance budgets, platform limits, legal or API rules…