Magpie review
Review a diff against the magpie ladder: over-building (should have stopped at a higher rung) and floor breaches (safety simplified away). Use on "magpie review" or any ask to check a diff for over-engineering, bloat, reinvented helpers, or new dependencies.From its SKILL.md
npx -y skills add crispuscrew/magpie --skill magpie-reviewAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- 1 stars1 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 file declares
Copied from the file, not written here
The file declares its own license as Apache-2.0. That is the author’s claim about this one file, and it is not the same thing as the license GitHub reports for the repository, which is listed with the other numbers below.
SKILL.md
2.0 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Magpie review
Review the diff the user points at (default: working tree against the default branch). Judge every hunk against the ladder in two directions — over-building and floor breaches. Read enough surrounding code to know what already exists; a reuse finding is only real if you name the existing thing.
Findings — over-building
For each finding, report:
file:line— where.- Rung — the highest ladder rung that already held (1–6) and what sits there: the existing helper, the stdlib call, the native feature, the installed dep, or the one-liner.
- Cost delta — what dropping to that rung saves:
saves: N lines, D deps, E entities. - Fix — the one-line replacement or deletion.
Typical catches: re-implemented helper that lives a few files over, new dependency for a few lines, interface with one impl, config for a constant, scaffolding "for later", guard duplicated per caller instead of once in the shared function.
Findings — floor breaches
Flag any hunk that removed or skipped the floor: input validation at a trust boundary, error handling that prevents data loss, security, accessibility, a calibration knob, or the ONE runnable check non-trivial logic must leave behind. A floor breach outranks every over-building finding — report it first.
Shortcut hygiene
A deliberate shortcut is fine iff marked with a reuse: comment naming
the ceiling and upgrade path. Unmarked shortcut → ask for the comment, not
for more code.
Output
Findings ordered floor-first, then by cost delta descending. Each finding at most three lines. No finding → say "clean at every rung" and stop; a review padded with nitpicks is itself over-building.