Agent skill · software engineering · mvanhorn
printing-press-polish
Polish a generated CLI to pass verification and become publish-ready. Runs diagnostics (dogfood, verify, scorecard, go vet, gosec), automatically fixes all issues (verify failures, static-analysis findings, dead code, descriptions, README, MCP tool quality), reports the before/after delta, and offers to publish. Use after any /printing-press run, or on any CLI in $PRESS_LIBRARY/. Trigger phrases: "polish", "improve the CLI", "fix verify", "make it publish-ready", "clean up the CLI", "get this ready to ship".
Why this skill is useful
Adds an executable script that automates the polishing process for CLI tools, ensuring they pass verification and are ready for publication.
What it needs
Requires go installed locally. About 11k tokens when loaded. Last updated 2026-08-06. 4,383 stars on the source repository.
What this skill does
/printing-press-polish Polish a generated CLI so it passes verification and is ready to publish. The retro improves the Printing Press. Polish improves the generated CLI. This skill runs in a forked context (context: fork) so its diagnostic and fix loop doesn't pollute the caller — the diagnostic spam, fix iterations, and re-diagnose noise stay scoped to the polish session, and the caller receives a clean summary. When to run After any /printing-press generation, especially when: The shipcheck verdict is ship-with-gaps The verify pass rate is below 80% The scorecard is below 85 You want the CLI publish-ready in one pass Can also be run standalone on any CLI in $PRESSLIBRARY/. Setup After setup, capture PRINTINGPRESSBIN=<abs-path> and use that absolute path for every cli-printing-press ... invocation in this skill. If setup emitted [go-toolchain-old] or [low-disk], surface the advisory to the user and continue unless setup also emitted [setup-error]. [go-toolchain-old] means later Go commands may download the required toolchain or fail when downloads are blocked; [low-disk] means this run may need several GiB for generated files, Go build cache, module downloads, or repository clones. Check binary version compatibility by reading the min-binary-version field from this skill's YAML frontmatter, running "$PRINTINGPRESSBIN" version --json, and parsing the version from the output. Compare it to min-binary-version using semver rules. If the installed binary is older than the minimum, stop immediately and tell the user: "cli-printing-press binary vX.Y.Z is older than the minimum required vA.B.C. …
How to use it
Reference it in AdaL, Claude Code, Cursor or any coding agent — nothing to install:
@skills mvanhorn/printing-press-polish