Reference hunt
Skill Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills/skills/reference-hunt
8 installable skills for Claude Code and OpenAI Codex, for finding your unknowns before they get expensive: blindspot pass, brainstorms, interviews, references, plans, notes, pitches, and a merge quiz. Community distillation, not official Anthropic.
npx -y skills add Neeeophytee/finding-unknowns-skills --skill reference-huntAssembled from the repository path, not quoted from the project. Check it against their README if it does not work.
One thing to look at
- no licenseNo license file was found in the repository. Code published without one is not open source by default, so using it at work is a question for whoever answers licensing questions where you are.
What its author says it does
Copied from the file, not written here
Use existing source code as the specification when the user can't describe what they want in words. Use when the user points at a library, module, folder, or site and says "like this," even if it's in a different language or stack.
SKILL.md
1.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it
Reference hunt
Some requirements are too intricate or too tacit to write down, but working code somewhere already embodies them. The best reference is not a screenshot or a description — it's source. Read it like a spec, then reimplement the semantics, not the syntax.
Steps
- Get the reference: a repo path, a vendored folder, a library name, or a site whose underlying code can be read. Ask what specifically to extract from it — behavior, structure, visual system, API shape — so you don't imitate the wrong dimension.
- Read the reference and produce a semantics summary before writing any code:
- the behaviors and guarantees it implements (timing, ordering, error handling, edge cases),
- the decisions that look deliberate versus incidental,
- anything that won't translate to the target language or stack, with a proposed equivalent.
- Have the user confirm the semantics summary. This is the moment misreadings get caught cheaply.
- Reimplement in the target stack: same semantics, native idioms. Do not transliterate line by line, and do not copy code verbatim from references whose license doesn't allow it — note the license if it's unclear.
- Close the loop: list each behavior from the summary and where the new implementation honors it, plus any place you consciously diverged and why.
Guardrails
- The reference defines what; the target codebase's conventions define how.
- If the reference itself turns out to be buggy or inconsistent, surface that instead of faithfully reproducing the bug.
- Respect licenses: extracting semantics is fine; copying incompatible code is not.