Nd velocity check

Skill jpoindexter/nd-skills/skills/nd-velocity-check

Track and surface the ratio of ideas captured vs items shipped. Warn when the capture:ship ratio is high — the ideas-rich/finish-poor pattern made visible.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add jpoindexter/nd-skills --skill nd-velocity-check

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SKILL.md

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Velocity Check — Making the Ideas:Shipped Ratio Visible

What this addresses

A common neurodivergent productivity pattern: ideas-rich, finish-poor. A session generates 10 new feature ideas, 3 new research threads, and 2 refactoring proposals — and ships zero things. The backlog grows faster than the done list. The backlog feels like progress (it's full of good ideas!) while the actual delivery rate is low.

This is a fluency excess pattern: divergent thinking generates more than convergent thinking can close. Making the ratio visible is the first intervention.

When to apply

Apply this skill:

At the start of a new session, when reviewing what's been done recently
When a user asks "what should I work on?" and there's a long backlog
When a user proposes adding something new and already has uncompleted items
As a periodic check-in when a session has been long

Instructions

Track captures and ships mentally (or read them from a log if available):
- A capture is: adding an item to the backlog, proposing a new feature, filing a ticket, writing a roadmap item
- A ship is: merging code, deploying, completing a tracked task, marking something done
Compute the 7-day ratio: captures in last 7 days : ships in last 7 days
Surface the ratio as a dim, non-blocking note:

"📊 Last 7 days: [N] ideas captured, [M] shipped ([ratio]:1). [Warn/OK]"
Warn when ratio > 5:1 (or when ships = 0 and there are captures):

"📊 Last 7 days: 12 captured, 2 shipped (6:1) — the backlog is growing faster than it's closing. Consider finishing before capturing."
Do not block or moralize. This is a visible metric, not a rule. The user may have a legitimate reason. Surface it once and move on.
On 'finish before capturing': Offer to show the top 3 backlog items (use nd-choicereduce skill).

Science basis

Metacognition — the ability to observe and regulate one's own thinking — is often reduced in ADHD and related profiles. The capture:ship ratio makes a hidden pattern legible. Once visible, the user can act on it. Without visibility, the pattern continues invisibly.

The fluency excess pattern (high ideation, lower completion) is well-documented in ADHD research and is not a character flaw — it's a cognitive style that benefits from external metrics. "What gets measured gets managed."

The 5:1 threshold is approximate: a healthy ratio in product work is roughly 3:1 (three ideas for every shipped item). At 5:1 and above, the backlog is actively growing in a way that will generate future decision paralysis.

What ships with it

Read from the repository

Just SKILL.md. No reference files, no scripts.

Gives 0 of the 12 instructions most quality gates skills give in 631 tokens

Counted across 1,195 of the 2,094 authors here whose files we hold, read 2026-08-07

Read the output and check the exit codein 54 of 1195, across 14 files
Verify requirements using a line-by-line checklistin 53 of 1195, across 12 files
Identify the verification command proving the claimin 51 of 1195, across 12 files
Run the full verification commandin 50 of 1195, across 11 files
Verify output confirms the claimin 49 of 1195, across 12 files
Check version control diff after agent delegationin 46 of 1195, across 6 files
State claim with evidencein 44 of 1195, across 4 files
Run the test suitein 33 of 1195, across 26 files
Keep state in memory by defaultin 27 of 1195, across 6 files
Make prototype runnable with one commandin 26 of 1195, across 5 files
Produce a verification reportin 25 of 1195, across 14 files
Detect the package manager from lockfilesin 24 of 1195, across 5 files

Said here and by no other author read

Track captures and ships from the last 7 days
Compute the 7-day captures to ships ratio
Surface the ratio as a non-blocking note
Warn when the capture to ship ratio exceeds 5:1
Warn when ships are zero and captures exist
Offer to show top 3 backlog items when warning

Grouped from the skills themselves: near-identical wordings counted once, and counted by distinct author, so one author publishing three of these counts once. Length counted with cl100k_base; the agent that loads this file may tokenize it differently.