excavate SKILL.md skillA
excavate from chrislacey89/skills is an agent skill: a SKILL.md folder an AI agent loads when a task calls for it.
mdr add chrislacey89/skills/excavate@git:20261018.026d760Pins git:20261018.026d760 in mdr.lock. Pin the fingerprint instead.
- Audit grade
- A, 17 of 17 checks passed
- Kind
- SKILL.md skill
- Repository
- chrislacey89/skills
- Path
excavate/SKILL.md- Versions recorded
- 4
- Latest version
- git:20261018.026d760, committed Oct 18, 2026
- First version recorded
- Oct 14, 2026
- Size
- 44,343 bytes
- Repository stars
- 4
- License
- MIT
User-invoked side-route for onboarding to a legacy repo with no docs/solutions/, research archive, or written decisions. Mines the last 12 months of git history and, when gh is available, PR bodies and review threads, into ranked hotspots, cited recovered decisions, and a who-to-ask map, then offers a PR of docs/solutions/ entries. Not for repos that already compound, not for judging people, not model-invoked.
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
# Excavate Recover what a legacy repo already knows about itself before the first feature runs blind on it. The output is an **off-tree dossier** (hotspots, coupling, recovered decisions, a who-to-ask map, and a Coverage block saying what the history could and could not tell you) plus an **opt-in PR of `docs/solutions/` entries** in `/compound`'s format, so `/research`, `/write-a-prd`, and `/execute` read them through the keyword grep they already run. Two things keep this honest. Tornhill's method mines version control as a *behavioral* record: a hotspot is the intersection of change frequency and complexity, neither axis alone, bounded to a fixed window, and it is a probability to inspect, not a verdict to act on. And the Grounding Rule (`references/visual-rendering-core.md` § 1) splits every artifact: SHAs, PR numbers, paths, counts, and quoted rationale are copied from `git` and `gh` output, never retyped; the model writes only the prose around them. A decision whose "why" is the model's guess is not recovered, it is invented, and it stays out of the repo. ## Invocation Position **Side-route, user-invoked only.** It fires when a human types `/excavate`; …
Read the whole file at its exact version.
How to install
mdr add chrislacey89/skills/excavate@sha256:f175dafab7c94e2bThe line at the top of this page pins the label git:20261018.026d760, 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.
[](https://markdownregistry.com/a/art_y7x2xmy5wni3hkxv)
3 badge image fetches in 30 days. What the badge shows.
Versions
The registry has recorded 4 versions of this file, between Oct 14, 2026 and Oct 18, 2026, about one every 2 days.
| version | committed | commit | size | audit | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| git:20261018.026d760 latest | 2026-10-18 | 026d760 | 44,343 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20261018.76419c3 | 2026-10-18 | 76419c3 | 44,324 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20261018.b4cd67c | 2026-10-18 | b4cd67c | 44,464 B | A | view · diff |
| git:20261014.1dd1817 | 2026-10-14 | 1dd1817 | 43,784 B | A | view |
Audit of the latest version
- pass: Frontmatter block present
- pass: Frontmatter declares a name
- pass: Frontmatter declares a description
- pass: Size between 200 bytes and 200 KB (44343 bytes)
- pass: No zero-width or bidi control characters
- pass: No instruction hidden inside an HTML comment
- pass: No link to an exfiltration or paste host
- pass: No credential-shaped string
- pass: No instruction to send local credentials anywhere
- pass: No text hidden with inline styles
- pass: No prompt-injection phrasing
- pass: No curl or wget piped into a shell
- pass: No recursive delete of root, home or parent
- pass: No instruction to read or print local credentials
- pass: No base64 blob over 200 characters
- pass: No link to a raw IP address
- pass: No script tag
Source
chrislacey89/skills · 4 stars · license MIT · pushed 2026-10-22 · branch prod
API
GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/artifacts/art_y7x2xmy5wni3hkxv GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/resolve?ref=chrislacey89/skills/excavate GET https://markdownregistry.com/api/v1/blob/f175dafab7c94e2bf51dff0bdab9c551b7b2fa2fa6e0aa4c8795f3f9438e9e74
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.
Guides: the SKILL.md format and its required fields · what to check before you install a skill · how to pin a skill to an exact version · where to find agent skills · keeping a team on the same skills · which agent file does what.