Open Steps, translated GitHub

Skill pack for AI vibe coding

Your agent speaks engineer.
Read it in your own words.

Open Steps is a free pack of skills for coding agents. It turns jargon into plain language and gives steps you can follow. For the person running the build, not reading the code.

The same session, in plain language

On the left, what the agent said. On the right, what it meant.

a session without the pack

> All done?

● Hotfix deployed: session TTL misconfig in auth middleware caused 401 cascades after key rotation; patched the refresh path, invalidated stale JWTs, redeployed api+web.

Root cause: env drift after the 09-14 rollout. SESSION_TTL resolved to 30s instead of 30m because the staging overlay shadowed the prod values file.

Timeline: first 401 spike 14:02, auth deploy rolled back 14:19, patch merged 14:41, canary at 10% 14:52, full rollout 15:06. p95 back to 180ms from 2.4s.

Verification: 412/414 e2e green, 2 quarantined (already known, tracked). No schema change, no migration. Refresh-token reuse counter flat for 30m post-deploy. Follow-ups filed: values-file lint in CI, alert on SESSION_TTL below 5m. Neither blocking.

you, reading this...
the same session, with it

> All done?

● Skill: os-done-or-not

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
now, it's perfect

Preface, by the author

I am not an engineer. I am a market-led builder: I look for where demand already exists and the infrastructure does not, 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 vibe coding. 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 does not speak engineering.

So I built this pack, and that is 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.

Pavlo Kharmanskyi, the author of Open Steps Skills

Pavlo Kharmanskyi

kharmanskyi.com LinkedIn Instagram

A glossary of moments

Type the command, or just say the ordinary sentence.
Both switch the same skill on.

/os-done-or-not

A short report and a straight yes or no.

"All done?"

/os-ask-simple

Plain words, and one marked recommendation.

"Ask me simply."

/os-whats-next

One next task, and the reason it comes first.

"What now?"

/os-check-work

Every claim in another session's report, checked.

"Check the other session."

/os-step-by-step

Numbered steps for the part that needs you.

"What do I do?"

/os-say-simple

Any text again in plain words, with nothing left out.

"Say it simply."

How to obtain this edition

Start with the first one.

Ask your agent to do it

The shortest way, and the one that needs no terminal knowledge: paste this to your coding agent and let it install the pack for you. The skills and both hooks come wired with the plugin, so there is no second step.

Install the Open Steps skill pack for me: clone https://github.com/kharmanskyi/open-steps, add it as a plugin marketplace and install the plugin, then append its docs/routing-block.md to my ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md. When you are done, tell me in plain words what changed.

Or install it yourself

Today the pack installs as a Claude Code plugin. Clone the repository, then run the second command from the folder that holds open-steps/. The skills and both hooks are wired for you.

git clone https://github.com/kharmanskyi/open-steps.git
claude plugin marketplace add ./open-steps && claude plugin install open-steps@open-steps

Make the routing a rule

One block in your own CLAUDE.md turns the skills from a choice into a rule that survives long conversations. Safe to re-run.

grep -q 'os-done-or-not' ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md 2>/dev/null || cat open-steps/docs/routing-block.md >> ~/.claude/CLAUDE.md

Questions before you install

The things people ask first, answered plainly. Pick one on the left.

Open Steps is a free, MIT-licensed pack of skills for coding agents. It does not change how your agent works; it changes how the agent talks to you. Instead of commit hashes and jargon, you get a short report in plain language, a straight verdict on whether the work is finished, and numbered steps whenever something genuinely needs your hands.