ub-mode

ub-mode is an agent skill that enforces disciplined software engineering principles when writing or changing code. It is loosely based on portions of @poteto's rules (poteto-mode / pstack), reduced and paired with deterministic quality-gate tools:

1. First Make it Work — Laziness Protocol, Foundational Thinking, TDD, Redesign From First Principles, Attack the Premise, Subtract Before You Add, Outcome-Oriented Execution, Build the Lever, and Architecture (Model the Domain, Boundary Discipline, Type System Discipline, Make Operations Idempotent, Separate Before Serializing Shared State).
2. Then Make it Right — Fix Root Causes, Sequence Work into Verifiable Units, Test Behavior (Not Implementation), Crapper (CRAP < 10), Dryer (duplication < 0.8), Mutator (cover the uncovered, kill the survivors, delete dead code), and Refactoring.
3. Practice — Keep a Log, Guard the Context Window, Worktree Cleanup, and Commit and Push in small ordered commits.

Companion Tool Repositories

ub-mode relies on deterministic quality-gate tools to enforce structure, complexity, duplication, and test thoroughness:

• unclebob/crapper — Computes cyclomatic complexity, test coverage, and CRAP score per function so every function stays under the CRAP threshold (< 10).
• unclebob/dryer — Detects structural code duplication so duplicate blocks (>= 0.8 similarity) are eliminated.
• unclebob/mutator — Runs mutation testing to expose uncovered code and surviving mutants that tests fail to catch.
• unclebob/uml-viewer — Visualizes components, coverage, CRAP, mutation scores, and dependency directions.

Installation

Copy SKILL.md into your agent's skills directory as ub-mode/SKILL.md (for example ~/.grok/skills/ub-mode/SKILL.md, ~/.claude/skills/ub-mode/SKILL.md, or ~/.cursor/skills/ub-mode/SKILL.md), then invoke /ub-mode.