doctrine

Software engineering discipline grounded in named primary standards (OWASP, ITIL, IETF RFCs, ISO, BABOK, SBAR, and more) instead of invented convention. 33 skills covering the software development lifecycle: TDD, code review, incident response, domain modeling, deployment, dependency management, and more.

New to Doctrine? Start with the bilingual Doctrine Wiki.

Three ways to use it, depending on your tool:

Option 1: Claude Code plugin

Native install for Claude Code: the right skill is auto-invoked from its description, no manual copying.

/plugin marketplace add aethrox/doctrine
/plugin install doctrine

Toggle it off later from enabledPlugins in ~/.claude/settings.json, same as any other plugin.

Option 2: MCP server (Claude Desktop, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, and anything else that speaks MCP)

Requires Node.js >= 18.

Every skill is exposed as an MCP prompt: the same content, reachable from any MCP-capable client, not just Claude Code. Add it as a local MCP server:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "doctrine": {
      "command": "npx",
      "args": ["-y", "github:aethrox/doctrine"]
    }
  }
}

(Exact config location and format differ per client; Claude Desktop's claude_desktop_config.json, Cursor's .cursor/mcp.json, etc., but the command/args above are the same everywhere.)

Run it directly to confirm it works:

npx github:aethrox/doctrine

Option 3: manual copy (no plugin system, no MCP client)

git clone https://github.com/aethrox/doctrine.git
for s in doctrine/skills/*/; do
  name=$(basename "$s")
  cp -r "$s" ~/.claude/skills/"$name"/
done

Re-run after pulling updates to resync.

How it works

Every skill follows the same shape: a one-sentence defining constraint (the fact that makes it behave differently from the obvious default), a numbered set of phases with concrete, checkable rules, and a closing checklist. The skills combine named external standards and established practices with clearly labeled Doctrine policy defaults.

See WORKFLOW.md for how the 33 skills relate to each other: the lifecycle they map to, which ones cross-reference which, and a worked example.

Skills

MCP server internals

mcp-server.js is a plain Node.js (ESM, no build step) script: at startup it reads every skills/<name>/SKILL.md, parses the name/description out of the frontmatter, and registers each one as an MCP prompt whose content is the full skill text. Run npm test to smoke-test it. The test validates every skill's frontmatter as real YAML, spawns the server and performs a real MCP handshake, asserts an exact prompts/list name match against the discovered skill set, and diffs each prompts/get response against its corresponding SKILL.md file byte-for-byte.

Limitations

None of the 33 skills have been battle-tested against a real release, incident, or security review yet; they're authored from standards but not yet validated in use. The MCP server has a smoke test (npm test) but hasn't been exercised against a real third-party MCP client (Cursor, Windsurf, etc.) yet, only a scripted handshake. This repo has no SECURITY.md or vulnerability reporting channel yet.

Donate

Contributing

Adding a new skill or fixing an existing one? See CONTRIBUTING.md.

License

MIT, see LICENSE.