Check the docs

Skill buildmoonshot/skillpacks/skills/engineering/intermediate/check-the-docs

A beginner-to-expert curriculum of drop-in skills for Claude Code, Codex, and any coding agent. Copy-paste ready, tested, not a link farm.

Install

npx -y skills add buildmoonshot/skillpacks --skill check-the-docs

Assembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.

One thing to look at

2 stars2 stars. Stars are a popularity signal and not a quality one, but at this level it is likely that nobody has read this closely except its author, and you would be relying on your own review.

What its author says it does

Copied from the file, not written here

Use when writing or modifying code that calls an external library, framework, SDK, or API — especially one that is niche, recently updated, or whose exact method names and parameters you are not certain of. Makes the agent confirm real, current API signatures before using them, instead of inventing plausible-but-wrong calls from memory.

SKILL.md

2.0 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Check the Docs

Before calling into an external library or API, confirm the API is real and current — do not code it from memory and hope.

When to stop and check

You're reaching for a method, option, or parameter and you're not certain it exists with that exact name/shape.
The library has had major version changes (the API you remember may be gone).
It's niche or fast-moving — small libraries and recent releases are where memory is least reliable.
The user reported an error that looks like a wrong signature (X is not a function, unexpected argument).

What to do

Verify the signature against current documentation, the installed version's types/source, or an official reference — not your recollection.
Check the installed version. Read package.json / lockfile / requirements.txt. Match the docs to that version, not the latest.
Prefer the project's existing usage. If the codebase already calls this library, copy that real, working pattern over anything you'd reconstruct from memory.

When you can't verify

Say so, and mark the call as unverified: "I used client.search(...) from memory — confirm this matches your installed version, as I couldn't check the docs." An honest flag beats a confident hallucination.

Why this matters

Hallucinated API calls are the classic agent failure: confident, plausible, and completely wrong — array.removeWhere(), a timeout option that doesn't exist, a renamed method from three versions ago. They cost a debugging session to track down. Thirty seconds of checking prevents them.