German Technical Writing Skill
Natural German technical register for Jira comments and descriptions, internal German-language wiki/spec pages, and team-chat messages to German-speaking colleagues.
Catches literal English→German anglicisms (brechen, gefangen, returnen, triggern, failen) and substitutes the canonical technical lexicon (werfen, abfangen, zurückgeben, auslösen, fehlschlagen) while accepting ecosystem-standard Denglisch loanwords (der Commit, die Pipeline, die Exception).
🔌 Compatibility
This is an Agent Skill following the open standard originally developed by Anthropic and released for cross-platform use.
Supported Platforms:
- ✅ Claude Code (Anthropic)
- ✅ Cursor
- ✅ GitHub Copilot
- ✅ Other skills-compatible AI agents
Skills are portable packages of procedural knowledge that work across any AI agent supporting the Agent Skills specification.
Features
- Anti-pattern detection: ~60 false-friends catalogued —
brechen, gefangen, returnen, failen, triggern, hitten, plus calqued idioms (am Ende des Tages, Low-hanging Fruit) and pseudo-anglicisms (Handy, Beamer)
- Technical lexicon: preferred German forms with gender for Exceptions, Tests, Git, CI/CD, HTTP, Frontend, Data, and Architecture domains
- Register enforcement: Präsens-Indikativ default, impersonal voice, no first-person in artifacts, sentence-length and compound-noun rules, ß/ä/ö/ü orthography
- Artifact-specific conventions: Jira ticket descriptions, Jira comments, internal German wiki/spec pages
- Worked examples: 6 paired bad-vs-good cases with annotations
Installation
Marketplace (Recommended)
Add the Netresearch marketplace once, then browse and install skills:
# Claude Code
/plugin marketplace add netresearch/claude-code-marketplace
/plugin install german-technical-writing
Install with any Agent Skills-compatible agent:
npx skills add https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill --skill german-technical-writing
Download Release
Download the latest release and extract to your agent's skills directory.
Git Clone
git clone https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill.git
Composer (PHP Projects)
composer require netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill
Requires netresearch/composer-agent-skill-plugin.
npm (Node Projects)
npm install --save-dev \
@netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator \
github:netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill
Requires @netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator, which discovers the skill in node_modules and registers it in AGENTS.md via a postinstall hook. For pnpm, also allowlist the coordinator's postinstall:
{
"pnpm": {
"onlyBuiltDependencies": ["@netresearch/agent-skill-coordinator"]
}
}
Usage
The skill triggers automatically when composing German prose longer than one sentence for a German-audience artifact — Jira tickets and comments, internal German wiki/spec pages, or team-chat messages to German-speaking colleagues.
Example queries:
- "schreib bitte einen Jira-Kommentar auf OROSPD-692: der cart-merge-on-login Test failt weil ..."
- "HMKG-2202 ticket beschreibung muss neu geschrieben werden — problem/ziel format auf deutsch"
- "kurze Slack-Ankündigung ans HMKG team auf deutsch: Pipeline CI-383 ist grün"
- "drei-satz blurb auf deutsch fürs internal-wiki über das MeyerBaselineBundle"
The skill does not trigger for commit messages, MR/PR descriptions, release notes (all English at Netresearch and most agencies delivering customer projects), conversational chat replies, single-word acknowledgements, or English artifacts that happen to contain German identifiers.
Structure
skills/german-technical-writing/
├── SKILL.md # Trigger description, process, top-anti-pattern table
├── references/
│ ├── anti-patterns.md # ~60 false-friends catalogue with explanations
│ ├── lexicon.md # Technical term lexicon with gender
│ ├── register.md # Tense/voice/person, artifact conventions
│ └── examples.md # 6 paired real-world cases with annotations
└── evals/
└── evals.json # 15 trigger-eval queries with assertions
Contributing
Issues and pull requests welcome at https://github.com/netresearch/german-technical-writing-skill/issues.
When proposing new anti-pattern entries or lexicon additions, please include:
