SKILL.md
Brooks Lint
Overview
Brooks Lint is a Claude Code skill that reviews your code through the lens of 12 classic software engineering books. Instead of checking style rules, it asks: "What would the authors of The Pragmatic Programmer, Clean Code, and Designing Data-Intensive Applications say about this code?"
It synthesizes the principles from landmark engineering books into actionable, structured feedback — catching design smells, tight coupling, missing abstractions, and architectural risks that linters and AI tools typically miss.
Named after Fred Brooks, author of The Mythical Man-Month — because the hardest bugs are conceptual, not syntactic.
The 12 Books
| Book | Key Principles Applied |
|---|---|
| The Pragmatic Programmer | DRY, orthogonality, tracer bullets |
| Clean Code | Naming, function size, comment clarity |
| The Mythical Man-Month | Conceptual integrity, second-system effect |
| Designing Data-Intensive Applications | Data consistency, fault tolerance, scalability |
| A Philosophy of Software Design | Deep modules, information hiding, complexity |
| Refactoring | Code smells, extract method, encapsulation |
| Working Effectively with Legacy Code | Seams, characterization tests, dependency breaking |
| Domain-Driven Design | Ubiquitous language, bounded contexts, aggregates |
| Release It! | Stability patterns, timeouts, bulkheads, circuit breakers |
| Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programs | Abstraction, recursion, metalinguistic abstraction |
| The Art of UNIX Programming | Modularity, composability, rule of least surprise |
