uplevel

A Claude Code skill that uplevels a repository's engineering process.

Your repo isn't broken — its process is undocumented, unenforced, and living in three people's heads. That knowledge doesn't survive a new joiner, a busy week, or an agent working unattended.

Most tools tell you what is wrong. uplevel tells you what is not there — no CI on pull requests, or a check that reports green having run nothing. Absence is the finding nothing else surfaces, because a missing control produces no error to detect. It reports what it verified and marks what it could not.

It hands back a numbered plan and changes nothing until you reply with the numbers you want. Anything that could fail a colleague's merge is proposed, never applied.

Install

git clone https://github.com/rlx/uplevel.git
cd uplevel
mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
ln -sfn "$PWD/skills/uplevel" ~/.claude/skills/uplevel

Restart Claude Code. The skill is then available as /uplevel.

This links, so the working tree is the installed skill and git pull updates it. To copy instead, so the install survives deleting the clone:

mkdir -p ~/.claude/skills
rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/uplevel
cp -R skills/uplevel ~/.claude/skills/uplevel

To uninstall: rm -rf ~/.claude/skills/uplevel — it removes the link or the copy, never the clone.

Why each command is written the way it is

-sfn on the link: without n, a second run follows the existing link and creates a nested copy inside the clone.

rm -rf before the copy: cp -R into a path that already exists copies into it, so re-running without the removal nests a copy inside the install. Naming the destination explicitly does not prevent this — cp -R skills/uplevel ~/.claude/skills/ nests on the second run too. Updating a copy install means running the block again, so this is the second run, every time.

For a single project rather than every project, use .claude/skills/uplevel in that repo and commit it. Both commands are run against a clean HOME in CI, so this section is executed rather than asserted.

Use

/uplevel

Or ask in plain language: "uplevel this repo", "audit our engineering process", "we keep breaking production — what should we enforce?"

What the output looks like

Findings first, each tied to a file and line. Then a plan where every item carries the same six fields, so you can decide without reading back through the report:

**1. Make `make fmtcheck` actually check.**
prevents: a target named "check" silently rewriting a contributor's working tree
if skipped: item 2 tells people to run a command that edits their files
effort: 15 min, incl. review · affects: everyone who commits
undo: `git revert` — one line · needs: —

Reply with the numbers you want. if skipped is there so you can decline an item on purpose rather than by omission, and needs is there so picking 1, 3 never leaves you half-applied.

Full worked example: references/example-output.md.

What it covers

The gate and what it fails to cover, CI trigger correctness, Actions supply chain and token scopes, branch protection, release and deploy gates, destructive operations, migrations and backfills, and how completion is claimed.

Full detail in skills/uplevel/README.md, which ships with the skill.

Development

./scripts/install-hooks.sh   # after cloning; git does not install hooks for you
./scripts/check-repo.sh      # runs on every commit and in CI

See CLAUDE.md for project conventions.

Changelog

CHANGELOG.md, and the releases.

License

MIT. Copyright (c) 2026 Lior Rudnik and Tracey Mercer.