Maintainer skill

What it is

hl7-rust-maintainer-skill/ sits beside hl7-skill/ at the workspace root, in the same Agent Skills format. Where hl7-skill is for anyone using HL7 or this workspace, this one is for anyone changing the workspace itself — fixing a bug, widening dictionary coverage, editing a spec, or touching the website.

hl7-rust-maintainer-skill/SKILL.md — frontmatter

---
name: hl7-rust-maintainer-skill
description: Technical, implementation-level guidance for maintainers
  and contributors changing code, specs, or docs inside the hl7-rust
  workspace itself — repo layout, the spec-first rule, the exact pre-PR
  checklist, adding dictionary coverage, benchmarking a performance
  claim, fixing the website, and what CI actually gates. Use when the
  task modifies this repository's own crates, specs, docs, or website
  (not when the task is merely using the published crates to process
  an HL7® message — see hl7-skill for that).
---

What is inside it

It distills AGENTS.md and CONTRIBUTING.md rather than replacing them — both stay canonical, and this skill is updated alongside them when a convention changes:

• The repo layout: one Cargo.lock at the root, members depending on each other by relative path, and where MSRV is pinned once and inherited.
• The rule that matters most — each crate's spec/index.md is the single source of truth for its behavior; a code change that contradicts it is either a bug fix or an unstated spec change, and the two must never drift.
• The exact pre-PR checklist, reproduced below.
• Recipes for the contributions that come up most: adding dictionary coverage, arguing a performance change with a benchmark before/after, and fixing the website in the right repository.
• Exactly what each CI job in ci.yml gates.

The checklist it exists to save you from forgetting

cargo test                                    # unit and integration tests
cargo clippy --all-targets -- -D warnings     # lint-clean
cargo fmt --check                             # formatting
cargo rustdoc --lib -- -W missing-docs        # every public item documented
cargo +1.96 check --workspace --all-targets   # the MSRV floor
./bin/check-trademarks                        # HL7®/FHIR®/CDA® fair-use rules
./bin/check-docs                              # doc size budget + link integrity

Every line here is exactly what .github/workflows/ci.yml runs — passing it locally is passing CI, not a proxy for it. Touched hl7-rust.github.io/? Its own pnpm run check and pnpm run build are the remaining two gates.

Using it

Same as its sibling: nothing to install. An agent working in this checked-out repository picks up whichever skill's description matches the task — Agent skill for using HL7 or this workspace, this one for changing the workspace itself.