Piggy explain

Skill stvhanna/Piggy-/skills/piggy-explain

Explain why a simplification was chosen instead of the more elaborate alternative, for the last piggy edit or a pointed-to piece of code. Teaching tool, not a review. Use when the user says "explain this", "why so simple", "piggy explain", "/piggy-explain", "why not use a class here", or asks what a piggy: comment means.From its SKILL.md

Install

npx -y skills add stvhanna/Piggy- --skill piggy-explain

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.

SKILL.md

1.9 KB, as published. Nobody here has run it

Piggy Explain

Walk through why the lazy version was chosen over the elaborate one, for one target: the last piggy edit, a piggy: comment, or whatever the user points at. Teaching, not judging — assume the reader wants to understand the tradeoff, not be told they were wrong to ask.

Format

For the target, answer three things in order:

The elaborate version — one line naming what a from-scratch implementation would look like (class, framework, abstraction).
The rung that caught it — which step on the ladder made it unnecessary: YAGNI, stdlib, native platform, existing dependency, or one-line reduction.
The ceiling — the point at which the lazy version stops working and the elaborate one would earn its keep.

target: rate limiter middleware

elaborate: token-bucket class with configurable refill, storage backend, per-route rules.
rung:      stdlib — a Map of timestamps and a window check covers single-process rate limiting in ~10 lines.
ceiling:   multi-process/multi-instance deployment needs shared state (Redis) instead. Single ceiling, one trigger.

When there's a `piggy:` comment

Read it directly — it already names the ceiling and upgrade path. Explain why that ceiling was chosen as the stopping point rather than building past it, don't just restate the comment.

Boundaries

Explains one target at a time; for a whole file or diff, point to /piggy-review instead. Doesn't change code, doesn't re-open the decision. "stop piggy-explain" or "normal mode" to revert.