SOTA Engineering Skills

State-of-the-art API design and audit guidance (2026) covering REST/HTTP, GraphQL, gRPC, WebSockets/SSE/realtime, webhooks, versioning/evolution, and API security/operations. Use when designing or building any API surface (endpoints, schemas, protos, realtime channels, webhook senders/receivers) AND when auditing/reviewing existing APIs for correctness, evolvability, security, and operational robustness. Trigger keywords: API, REST, GraphQL, gRPC, endpoint, websocket, SSE, realtime, WebRTC, webhook, versioning, OpenAPI, pagination, idempotency, rate limit, problem+json, protobuf, deprecation.

State-of-the-art software and system architecture rules (2026) for both building and auditing. Use when designing, building, refactoring, or extending system architecture — boundaries, DDD, hexagonal/clean architecture, event-driven design, CQRS, sagas, messaging, caching, sharding, multi-tenancy, resilience, scalability, 12-factor/cloud-native — AND when auditing existing architecture for quality (design review, anti-patterns like distributed monolith or shared database, reliability/scalability assessment). Trigger keywords: architecture, system design, microservices, monolith, serverless, bounded context, DDD, aggregate, hexagonal, clean architecture, event-driven, Kafka, NATS, JetStream, messaging, pub/sub, stream, consumer, queue, saga, outbox, idempotency, CQRS, resilience, circuit breaker, retry, timeout, backpressure, caching, sharding, partitioning, multi-tenant, 12-factor, cloud-native, feature flag, ADR, scalability, anti-pattern, design review, architecture audit.

State-of-the-art rules for writing and auditing asynchronous and concurrent code across runtimes (Python asyncio, JS/Node, Go, Rust, JVM). Use when building anything with async/await, threads, processes, event loops, task groups, channels, or queues — and when auditing existing code for race conditions, deadlocks, leaked tasks, blocked event loops, missing cancellation, or backpressure failures. Trigger keywords: async, await, concurrency, parallelism, threads, race condition, deadlock, event loop, channels, queues, semaphore, mutex, cancellation, timeout, backpressure, task group, goroutine, tokio, asyncio.

State-of-the-art C and C++ engineering rules (2026 baseline) that Claude applies when writing or auditing C/C++. Covers modern idioms (RAII, value semantics, smart pointers, C++23), memory safety (lifetimes, bounds, sanitizers, hardening flags), undefined behavior, security (SEI CERT C/C++, MISRA, integer/buffer/format-string, injection), concurrency (C/C++ memory model, atomics, data races), build/tooling/CI (CMake, clang-tidy, cppcheck, ASan/UBSan/TSan, vcpkg/Conan, supply chain), and performance. Trigger keywords - C, C++, cpp, RAII, smart pointer, unique_ptr, shared_ptr, undefined behavior, UB, buffer overflow, use-after-free, double-free, sanitizer, ASan, UBSan, TSan, valgrind, CMake, clang-tidy, clang-format, cppcheck, MISRA, CERT C, memory safety, std::thread, atomics, std::move. Use for BOTH building C/C++ libraries/systems and reviewing or auditing them.

State-of-the-art CLI and developer-tool UX guidance (2026) covering command and flag design, output and interaction (stdout/stderr, --json, TTY detection, exit codes, prompts), runtime behavior and lifecycle (signals, dry-run, idempotency, XDG paths, completions, telemetry), and distribution (packaging, checksums, docs). Use when designing or building any command line tool, subcommand, TUI, or developer tool — in any framework (argparse, click, typer, clap, cobra, oclif, commander) — AND when auditing an existing CLI for usability, scriptability, and compatibility. Trigger keywords: CLI, command line tool, flags, subcommands, terminal output, TUI, developer tool, argparse, clap, cobra, exit code, shell completion, man page, stdin, stdout.

1 hook across 1 event