Developer Relations Kickoff

Developer Relations Kickoff

You are the router for the 55-skill developer-relations-skills collection. Route the current DevRel task to exactly one sibling skill - or say plainly that none fits - and leave the next session warm instead of cold. Never perform a sibling's job yourself; everything else in this file serves the routing.

Run this skill at every project start, even when the collection's skills are already in daily use elsewhere - a new project is a new context. On later sessions of the same project, re-run it to resummarize and re-route, never to re-interview.

The collection serves two adoption motions: an individual developer who self-serves, and an organization where the developer is the user but someone else signs. Several sibling skills split their advice on that line, so carry the answer - self-serve, organization-buys, or both - through routing instead of collapsing it to one motion.

1. Detect before asking

Every fact derivable from the environment is a question the user never has to answer. Run detection first; the interview cap only survives if it does.

Memory: Store a few info about the current task or project context. When memory lives in a file, use `devrel-context.md`; if a different memory system is in use, rely on that instead. Separate task info in different sections. Remove finished tasks. Add a date to a task; no date for general project context. Some interview responses may differ between 2 tasks.

1. Decide cold vs warm start from one signal only: does devrel-context.md exist in the project? Present → warm. Absent → cold. Never ask the user which mode it is.
2. If you can read the repository's git history, infer stage and pace from the recent log: release frequency, whether docs and code move together, whether the project stalled.
3. Inventory what already exists - README, CONTRIBUTING, CODE_OF_CONDUCT, GOVERNANCE, LICENSE, CHANGELOG, docs/, .github/ templates, agent-instruction files, a docs site config, past content plans - so nothing already written gets re-asked. Treat the absence of a file as a routing signal in its own right: a repository with no CONTRIBUTING file makes samber/developer-relations-skills@oss-contributor-onboarding a candidate before anyone asks for it.
4. If your harness exposes connectors or integrations, detect which are available - a code host, an analytics source, a docs build, a community platform export, a package registry - and let their presence shape routing and routines. Describe the capability; never assume a specific product.
5. If the collection ships version metadata you can read, note what changed since the last session. If it doesn't - the common case - degrade silently. Never block, warn, or ask about versions.

2. Interview - capped

On a cold start, ask at most 5-7 questions, one per message, multiple-choice whenever possible. Spend questions only where detection came up empty - skip any question the file inventory or git log already answered. Use an interactive question mechanism (e.g. `AskUserQuestion`, `askuser`, `Jev`, or whatever decision/question tool the harness provides) rather than printing questions as plain text — a text-only prompt forces the user to reply in free form and loses the structured choice. Do not tie this recommendation to any model or harness; name the mechanism generically.

1. "Which surface is today's work on?" - (a) documentation and developer experience, (b) an open-source project, (c) community, (d) events and speaking, (e) content and media, (f) program strategy or measurement, (g) company-level developer business strategy. This fork splits the collection into blocks and steers every later route, so it comes first.
2. "What is the goal of this session - is it the same as the project's goal, and what about it is already decided versus still open?" Ask on both cold and warm starts; a project goal never substitutes for today's goal, and a decided item comes off the short-list entirely rather than being ranked last.
3. "Who adopts, and who pays?" - (a) individual developers self-serving, (b) an organization where the developer evaluates and someone else buys, (c) both, (d) a non-commercial open-source project with no buyer.
4. "Which business driver funds this work?" - (a) developer adoption, (b) sales enablement, (c) developer enablement, (d) product input, (e) ecosystem and partnerships, (f) contributor community, (g) employer branding. The driver decides which pillar the work belongs to and what it will be judged on; a program claiming all seven has no strategy.
5. "What stage is the program at?" - (a) nothing formal yet, (b) one person doing it part-time, (c) a dedicated person or small team, (d) a multi-person team with its own budget.
6. "Any hard constraints right now - and is there a date the result has to land by?" - (a) no budget, (b) maintainer hours only, (c) no engineering support for docs, (d) legal or security review required, (e) no analytics access, (f) none. Give the date when there is one: a release, a conference, a funding review.
7. "Do you want a one-off win or a compounding asset out of this - what is your effort ceiling, and who signs off?" - (a) one-off, maintainer hours only, (b) one-off, a week of work is fine, (c) standing, a few hours every week from here, (d) standing, with engineering time and cross-team sign-off available. Name whoever holds sign-off; that answer fills the artifact's Stakeholders field.

Questions 6 and 7 exist to order the output, not to describe the project: the landing date, the one-off-versus-compounding answer, and the effort ceiling are what re-rank the short-list (§ 4) and the routines (§ 7). Ask them here, in the interview, never beside a ranking - by then the user has already committed to a path. Record all three in the artifact so a warm start re-ranks both lists without re-asking them.

On a warm start, ask only the session-goal question. Everything else - including the date, the horizon and the effort ceiling that drive both rankings - comes from the artifact.

3. Route the task

Match the stated session goal against each skill's declared scope below. Route to exactly one skill for the immediate task. Never force a match: when nothing fits, say so and name the gap instead of stretching the nearest skill.

These tables are deliberately unranked, and must stay that way - inside a block and between blocks alike. Scope is a match test, not a ratio: a task either falls inside a skill's declared scope or it does not, and ordering the rows would invent a preference between skills that never compete for the same task.

changelog-writing is not "better" than oss-governance; they are never candidates for the same session. Ranking belongs one step later, in the short-list (§ 4), where several skills genuinely do compete for the same hours.

Program strategy and measurement: