Skills

Where an auditor scores what you have, this decides what to write. Diátaxis’ four modes expand into the fourteen types a developer product actually ships — quickstart, migration guide, troubleshooting, SDK reference, runbook. The pluggable style guides are the pragmatic part: pick Google or Stripe and inherit a settled answer on voice, person and tense instead of re-running that argument in every review.

Docs are the highest-leverage surface you own and nobody scores their own. A thirty-three-check pass with a number at the end is worth having because it turns “our docs are fine” into a claim someone can disagree with before a launch, and because its AI-discoverability half is work most docs teams have not been asked to do yet.

For most developer products the README is the landing page: where a link from Hacker News lands, and what a model retrieves when someone asks what your thing does. It is the only skill here that treats it as a scored artifact, every rule traced to a source and review returning concrete replacement text for the worst offender. Reach for it before a launch, and again the moment an install command changes.

For a growing share of your users the tool description is the documentation: they never read the reference, because an agent chose your tool on one sentence and a JSON schema. That makes naming, annotations and error copy a first-touch surface nobody else in the company will own. The phase worth stealing is the last: ten verifiable evaluations that measure whether a model can complete real tasks against your server.

Activation rarely dies at install; it dies in the hour after, when the first call returns an error nobody documented. The six sections this grades map onto that hour, and the two teams usually miss — error handling and troubleshooting — are the two nobody is measured on. Run it on your own SDK docs and on the competitor a prospect is comparing you against.

Audit tools tell you what is missing; this changes how you brief the work in the first place. Twelve rules across content, technical implementation, authority and platforms, each with templates and config you can lift. It is here because the rules are organised the way a marketer thinks rather than the way a crawler works.

The third GEO entry here, and the one that goes past reporting: improve-aeo- geo proposes framework-specific changes to the site itself. Pick between the three by what you are short of — the knowledge, the number, or the diff. The marketing engineer it assumes, comfortable opening a pull request against the marketing site, is the role this whole shelf quietly requires.

The cheapest check on this page: minutes, no credentials, and it answers a question most devtool teams have not formally asked — whether the systems now fielding “what should I use for X” can reach and parse you at all. Treat a pass as a floor rather than a strategy: being legible is not being chosen.

The closest thing to this guide in installable form, grouped the way the work divides — audience, content, distribution, developer experience, growth, lifecycle. The move worth stealing is developer-audience-context: state your persona, their technical level and their pain points once, and every other skill reads it first, which is what stops the output drifting into generic SaaS voice.

DevRel’s real input is what developers say when you are not in the room, and most teams do it badly because the work is unglamorous, cross-platform and never finished. Handing the sweep to an agent makes the cadence survivable; its siblings in the repo cover what to do once you have heard something.

A skill is a content surface that did not exist two years ago: your migration gotchas, your idiomatic error handling, installed into the tool a developer is already in and invoked without them ever visiting your site. This builds and validates one, and the discipline it enforces is the discipline good docs need anyway — a description tight enough to trigger on the right task, and a body small enough to stay read.

The changelog is read more often than the blog and owned by nobody, because turning forty commits into user-facing language loses to whatever shipped that week. An agent draft restores the cadence — but keep the human edit: the categories come from the commits, “change your webhook handler before August” never does.

The most-used shelf of the lot — 51k stars as of September 2026 — and it earns its place here for a structural reason: every skill reads product-marketing first, one file holding your product, audience and positioning, so the claim is stated once and inherited rather than re-improvised on every page. The skills are generic B2B by default; that context file is where you make them survive contact with an engineer.