shower
Cold-read the artifact you're focused on from a fresh, zero-context sub-session to confirm it stands on its own — a shower-thought reset for accumulated session bias. Use when a long session has worn away your fresh eyes and you can no longer tell whether the artifact in focus is clear to someone with no prior context; before a handoff, publish, or merge; or when you want a clean-room comprehension smoke test. Spawns a separate context-free reviewer; it diagnoses, it does not fix.
- Installs
- 1.3K
- Last 24h
- —
- Trending rank
- —
- Security
- Not audited
Install
Works with every agent the skills CLI supports.
npx skills add https://github.com/lilmgenius/paperthin --skill shower- 01
Install
Run the command in your project. The CLI asks which agents to install for.
- 02
Describe the task
Ask your agent for something this skill covers. It loads shower automatically when relevant.
- 03
Review the result
The agent follows the SKILL.md steps, scripts and references bundled with the skill.
SKILL.md
The instructions your agent reads when the skill is triggered.
Step out of the session and let a clean mind read it: does the artifact stand on its own?
Goal
A long session quietly accumulates context you can't un-see, so you lose the ability to judge whether your work reads clearly to a first-timer — you no longer know what you left unsaid (the unknown-unknowns). The fix is a literally fresh brain: a separate sub-session that never saw this conversation cold-reads the artifact in focus and reports where a clean reader would stall. A smoke test for comprehension and handoff. This skill diagnoses; the fixing happens back in the main session.
Workflow
- Pin the scope: the artifact (or set) currently in focus. If "in focus" is ambiguous, confirm with the user or take the artifact just produced or under discussion. Privately note, in one line, what it is meant to be and who it is for — your yardstick for step 4; the reviewer never sees it.
- Launch a fresh sub-session (a subagent / Task — it starts context-free). Hand it the artifact's contents (inline, or a copy), not a repo path, and tell it not to open the project's README, docs, or neighboring files that would spoil the cold read. Give it nothing about your intent or reasoning.
- Have it cold-read blind and report, from the artifact alone:
- what it takes the artifact to be, do, and expect;
- what is unclear, ambiguous, or assumed-but-unstated;
- what it would need to act confidently, and what it had to guess.
- Compare its blind understanding against the intent you noted in step 1 (which it never saw). Every mismatch is a defect in the artifact, not a reader error.
- Report the defects and concrete fixes, ordered by how badly each blocks a fresh reader.
Rules
- The read MUST come from a separate, context-free sub-session — never self-assess in this session, because you can't un-see the context (that is the whole point).
- Pass the artifact's contents, never your intent.
- A forced "I had to assume…" is a finding, not a reader failure.
- Medium-agnostic: adapt the cold-read questions to what the artifact is.
- A single cold read is a single draw and can still be confidently wrong at high stakes; it is the default, not the ceiling of diligence, so escalate to multiple independent reads when the stakes justify the cost.
- Read, don't sweep. The cold-read is an end-to-end read, not a pattern-grep — a sweep catches only known patterns and misses stale refs, dead links, fact drift, and silent edit-damage. Track how much was actually read; never report "clean" from a grep alone.
Verification
Before finishing:
- The read came from a fresh sub-session blind to your intent.
- Report the verdict (stands on its own / minor gaps / needs work) and hand the fixes to the main session.
FAQ
What does the shower skill do?
Cold-read the artifact you're focused on from a fresh, zero-context sub-session to confirm it stands on its own — a shower-thought reset for accumulated session bias. Use when a long session has worn away your fresh eyes and you can no longer tell whether the artifact in focus is clear to someone with no prior context; before a handoff, publish, or merge; or when you want a clean-room comprehension smoke test. Spawns a separate context-free reviewer; it diagnoses, it does not fix.
How do I install shower?
Run npx skills add https://github.com/lilmgenius/paperthin --skill shower in your project. The skills CLI detects the agents you use and copies the skill into the right folder. For Claude Code you can also place the skill folder at ~/.claude/skills/shower/ (personal) or .claude/skills/shower/ (project).
Which AI agents can use shower?
Any agent that supports the open Agent Skills format (a folder with a SKILL.md file), including Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, GitHub Copilot, Gemini CLI, Windsurf, Cline, OpenCode and more.
Is shower safe to install?
No partner security audit is available yet. Skills can run commands and scripts, so read the SKILL.md and any bundled files before installing.
Who maintains shower?
It is published by lilmgenius in lilmgenius/paperthin. It has 1,338 recorded installs.
More from lilmgenius/paperthin
dedash
lilmgenius/paperthin
Remove em-dashes and the dashes standing in for them from a user-owned scope, reading each occurrence in context and choosing the punctuation or wording that fits.
ssotize
lilmgenius/paperthin
Audit and consolidate a fact that's scattered across places into one canonical source, after approval, and replace the rest with references. Use when asked to find duplication, check consistency, locate the source of truth, deduplicate, consolidate, unify, or establish SSOT across artifacts or platforms. Starts read-only, reports the map and plan, then mutates only after explicit approval.
hate
lilmgenius/paperthin
Attack a plan, design, or argument like you want it to fail before you commit real effort — return the single load-bearing objection and the cheapest experiment that would prove it matters, not a checklist. User-invoked on purpose: a hate-it reflex always in the agent's reach would bias it toward demolition. Weighs many failure axes but owns the synthesis to one root.
factchk
lilmgenius/paperthin
Verify reality-grounded claims against external sources in both directions before they ship — could the 'absurd' be real, could the 'obvious' be false or long-established? Use whenever an artifact, or the sentence you are about to write, asserts something as plausible, realistic, absurd, novel, or impossible from intuition rather than a checked source; before relying on a factual claim in prose, a design rationale, a research claim, or a plan. Fires on metacognitive doubt — when you can't actually know, verify instead of trusting the feeling. Scans read-only, then fixes the clear errors or flags the judgment calls; leaves deliberate fiction alone.
re0
lilmgenius/paperthin
Refresh an existing artifact into the current best v0. Use when the user asks to clean up, sync up, dedupe, de-noise, smooth, rewrite, or update an artifact after iteration; when nearby artifacts may have drifted; or when changes in one place should be reflected across related artifacts while keeping the result minimal.
mandela
lilmgenius/paperthin
Audit any eval, metric, experiment, or benchmark for leakage — does external ground-truth enter independently, or are the model, scorer, and designer just confirming a result no outside truth ever produced? Use before trusting any 'how we'll know it worked' — an A/B, a holdout, a score, a validation — and whenever a result feels too clean or self-confirming. Walks an 8-pattern leakage taxonomy and returns only the patterns that fire, each with an independence fix. Read-only.
Popular testing & qa skills
tdd
mattpocock/skills
Test-driven development. Use when the user wants to build features or fix bugs test-first, mentions "red-green-refactor", or wants integration tests.
grilling
mattpocock/skills
Grill the user relentlessly about a plan, decision, or idea. Use when the user wants to stress-test their thinking, or uses any 'grill' trigger phrases.
migrate-to-shoehorn
mattpocock/skills
Migrate test files from as type assertions to @total-typescript/shoehorn. Use when user mentions shoehorn, wants to replace as in tests, or needs partial test data.
run-train
lllllllama/rigorpilot-skills
Rigor Train skill for deep learning research repositories. Use when a documented or selected training command should be run conservatively for startup verification, short-run verification, full kickoff, or resume, with command, config, seed, log, checkpoint, status, and metric evidence written to standardized trainoutputs/. Do not use for environment setup, exploratory sweeps, speculative idea implementation, or end-to-end orchestration.
test-driven-development
obra/superpowers
Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code
finishing-a-development-branch
obra/superpowers
Use when implementation is complete, all tests pass, and you need to decide how to integrate the work