Open Steps

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Plain-language agent skills for Claude Code, Codex, Cursor and Gemini CLI.

They keep development open to the person running it: the sessions, the decisions, the next steps, the whole picture.

By Pavlo Kharmanskyi.

I'm not an engineer. I'm a market-led builder: I look for where demand already exists and the infrastructure doesn't, then build the missing piece. Twenty years of building web and software products, always from the product side, and more than 50 developers at my company today.

Apart from the company, I started building a product on my own, just vibecoding. Partly to stay ahead of where all this is going, partly because I think the moment has arrived for people like me: you can now imagine a serious product and build it yourself, with no engineers or very few of them.

Then I ran straight into a wall. The agent does excellent work, then tells me about it in commit hashes and jargon, and I genuinely cannot tell whether we are done. Not because the work is unclear. Because nobody taught the agent to talk to someone who doesn't speak engineering.

So I built this pack. I'm sharing it here for anyone in the same position, and that's the whole idea behind the name: every step of building with an agent, kept open to the person doing the building. Right now it changes what the agent tells you. Where I want to take it next is the work itself, not just the reporting.

Before and after

The whole idea in one screen. Work ends, you ask "are we done?".

The same thing as text, if the picture does not load

Without the pack:

Hotfix deployed: session TTL misconfig in auth middleware caused 401 cascades after key rotation; patched the refresh path, invalidated stale JWTs, redeployed api+web. p95 back to 180ms. Root cause: env drift after the 09-14 rollout. Two flaky e2e specs quarantined (known, tracked)…

With it you get this:

People can sign in again. A bug was logging people out because their sessions expired far too early. The fix is live for everyone.

✅	Response times are back to normal
⚠️	Until this shipped, people were being logged out over and over.

Fully done?	Yes
Anything needed from you?	No
New debt?	Two small ones, written down
Safe to close?	Yes

Same facts. One screen. The bad news gets its own row instead of hiding in the middle of a paragraph. A second, longer example from a real session lives in this repository, with notes on what the rewrite changed: skills/os-done-or-not/references/01-prod-promote.md.

The skills

Skill	What it does	When it fires
os-done-or-not	A one-screen report with a verdict: done or not, anything needed from you, any new debt, safe to close	Work wraps up, or you ask how it went
os-step-by-step	Numbered steps a non-technical person can follow. The agent must first try everything itself and ask only for what truly needs you	The agent needs you to run, paste, click, approve or test something
os-ask-simple	The question in plain words, what it costs later, and one marked recommendation	The agent has a question or options for you
os-what-could-go-wrong	Assumes the decision already failed and works backwards to find out why, in a fresh agent that had no hand in it. Ends on one verdict	Something hard to undo is about to be agreed: a contract, a purchase, a migration, a launch
os-whats-next	Merges what is verified and ready, then recommends the next task and says why in plain words	You ask what is left or what to do next
os-check-work	Does not trust another session's report. Checks every claim against what actually happened, then says what to do about it	Another session says it is done
os-say-simple	Rewrites any text in plain words without losing facts or bad news. Give it a number and you get exactly that many points	Any text reads like engineering: a report, a comment, an error, the agent's own answer
os-big-picture	Keeps one BIG-PICTURE.md: what the product is, every feature with how far it got, which parts nobody uses any more, and what is queued. It offers to open the queue as tickets in a tracker you already use	You ask where the project stands, or a session report was just written

They work as a loop: os-whats-next picks the work, os-step-by-step walks you through your part, os-done-or-not reports the result, os-check-work accepts what other sessions did, os-ask-simple handles the questions on the way, os-what-could-go-wrong attacks anything hard to undo before it is agreed, and os-say-simple rescues any text that still reads like engineering. os-big-picture keeps the standing file whose queue os-whats-next reads as its backlog.

os-big-picture writes its file in plain words, so you get the whole picture without reading code. It measures from git how old each part is and whether anything still uses it, and it dates what it cannot measure. It opens tickets in your tracker only after you say yes. The file stays out of your commits unless you add it yourself. It never invents a task and never deletes anything. The rules and the reasons behind them are in skills/os-big-picture/.

What it does on its own

The pack finishes finished work by itself. If a pull request has green checks and an approved review, the agent verifies it once more and merges it. On Claude Code that happens without a permission prompt.