🎭 Shellspeare

"To merge, or not to merge — that is the pull request."

A cross-agent persona — built on the Agent Skills standard — that bids your coding agent speak in Early Modern English, the tongue of Shakespeare, for every turn of every session, on any topic. Works with Claude Code, Codex CLI, Gemini CLI, Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Copilot, and any other agent that reads a Markdown rule file.

Technical advice remaineth correct. Only the prose around it dons doublet and hose.

Long before TLS handshakes and certificate chains, the Bard was already wrestling with the woes of insecure transport. Shakespeare: a precursor in programming, debugging connection errors four centuries ahead of his time.

Sample

$ /shellspeare

> Hark! Thy `fetchUser` function returneth a Promise, yet
> thou awaitest it not. Thus doth `user` hold not the soul
> thou seekest, but the empty husk of a Promise. Prithee,
> prepend `await`, and the data shall be thine.

Install

For the full per-agent install matrix, see INSTALL.md. The short version:

Agent	How
Claude Code	/plugin marketplace add paccodes/shellspeare then /plugin install shellspeare@shellspeare
Codex CLI (and anything reading AGENTS.md)	Drop AGENTS.md into your project root
Gemini CLI	gemini extensions install https://github.com/paccodes/shellspeare
Cursor / Windsurf / Cline / Copilot	npx skills add paccodes/shellspeare -a <agent>

Usage

• Always on: once installed, the agent speaks in the Bard's tongue from the very first turn of every session, on any topic — technical or otherwise.
• Manually (Claude Code): type /shellspeare at any time to summon the Bard if he hath somehow gone quiet.
• To exit: ask for plain english, normal mode, or simply drop the voice. The agent returneth to its workaday register without ceremony.

What stays literal

Identifiers, file paths, shell commands, error messages, version numbers, and anything in backticks are never archaized. Shellspeare is a costume for the prose, not a translator for the code.

✓ "Thy function `useReducer` hath a stale closure over `count`."
✗ "Thy function `useth-reducer` hath a stale closure o'er `countst`."

Repo layout

shellspeare/
├── .claude-plugin/
│   └── marketplace.json               # Claude Code plugin marketplace entry
├── .github/
│   └── workflows/                     # CI — validates SKILL.md frontmatter on PRs
│       ├── lint-skill.yml
│       └── validate_skill.py
├── assets/                            # images and other static assets
├── commands/
│   └── shellspeare.md                 # /shellspeare slash command (Claude Code)
├── skills/
│   └── shellspeare/                   # canonical skill (source of truth)
│       ├── examples.md                # before/after exchanges
│       ├── glossary.md                # jargon → EME translations
│       └── SKILL.md                   # persona + standing instructions
├── AGENTS.md                          # autodiscovery file for Codex CLI and AGENTS.md-aware agents
├── CONTRIBUTING.md
├── gemini-extension.json              # Gemini CLI extension manifest
├── GEMINI.md                          # context file loaded by the Gemini CLI extension
├── INSTALL.md                         # per-agent install matrix
├── LICENSE
└── README.md

Cursor, Windsurf, Cline, Copilot, and the long tail of other agents are reached through the upstream skills CLI rather than committed mirror files — see INSTALL.md.

Contributing

Pull requests for new glossary entries, exemplars, or voice refinements are most welcome. Keep additions terse and technically accurate — a witty line that misleadeth is worse than no line at all. See CONTRIBUTING.md for the full guide.

License

MIT. See LICENSE.