Senior Dev Skills for AI Coding Agents

Coding agent skills to think like a Senior Engineer.

By TheSeniorDev · MIT-licensed · Contributions welcome

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Install

npx skills@latest add the-senior-dev/senior-dev-skills

Or with Claude Code’s native plugin marketplace:

/plugin marketplace add the-senior-dev/senior-dev-skills
/plugin install senior-dev-skills@senior-dev-skills

Restart Claude Code (or open a new session) to pick up the new skills.

Need Claude Code? Get it at claude.com/code.

How to use in Claude Code

Invoke a skill by name, with an optional argument:

/react-senior-code-review src/features/checkout   # review a feature
/react-senior-interview state                       # quiz yourself on state & data flow

react-senior-code-review takes a path to the feature you want reviewed; react-senior-interview takes an optional topic (or none, for a broad interview).

What’s inside

These skills are like having a Senior Engineer by your side, pointing out things you might have missed. They leverage Software Fundamentals, Design Patterns, and Senior Mental Models — together with the power of Claude Code — to push your code toward production readiness, prep you with real interview questions, and ground every call in deep domain knowledge and fundamentals. Keep in mind they are:

• Highly opinionated. Biased toward what holds up in production — the wisdom a senior reviewer brings, not a neutral checklist.
• Anti-useEffect. Reach for derived state first, then event handlers, then render-time computation. Effects are the last resort.
• Server state ≠ client state. Server data lives in a query layer (TanStack Query, SWR, route loaders, RSC) — never in useState+useEffect, never in Zustand.
• Push state down. State lives as close to its consumer as possible.
• Colocate, then share. Code used by one feature stays in that feature; promote it to shared/ only when a second feature actually needs it.
• Name the pattern. Custom hook? Compound components? HOC? Render prop? State machine? Optimistic update? If a known pattern fits the fix, it gets named.