point-the-cheap-probes-at-young-codelisted

Use when you need to FIND work in an unfamiliar repo rather than pick it off a tracker — a new house, or one whose issue backlog is claimed faster than you can read it. Four probes cost minutes each and need no domain knowledge: does any test fail when run alone, does the suite survive a shuffled order, does the race detector fire, does a fuzz target crash. Each one asserts on the SELECTOR'S YIELD, never on the exit code, because every runner treats "matched nothing" as success. And the yield of these probes is a function of the codebase's age and hardening, not of your effort: four probes over a thirteen-year-old repo with OSS-Fuzz integration found nothing in an hour, and the same shuffle probe found a real defect on a three-year-old fork in one run. Trigger terms: new repo, where do I start, find a bug, no good first issues, backlog is claimed, flaky, test isolation, order dependent, -shuffle, -race, go test, cargo test, runtest.
serhiy-bzhezytskyy/contrib-receipts · ★ 1 · AI & Automation · score 75

Install: claude install-skill serhiy-bzhezytskyy/contrib-receipts

## Purpose Picking a listed issue puts you in a queue. In a fast house the queue moves in hours — measured: three well-specified DataFusion issues, all three had an open PR within a day, one of them filed by the reporter alongside their own fix. **A defect you generate yourself has no queue.** These four probes generate them. They need no understanding of the domain, they run before you have read a line of the architecture, and each produces a *reproduction* — which is the artifact maintainers are short of, not opinions. ## When to use - First contact with a repo, straight after the door has been priced. - The tracker looks rich but every item is assigned or has a PR. - A `help wanted` thread asks for reproductions in so many words. - Before believing any suite is clean because CI is green. ## When NOT to use - The house prohibits the class of contribution you would make — price that first. - You already have a specific, unclaimed, well-specified defect. Then go do that. - The repo is very old, very large and fuzz-integrated **and** you have limited time: expect negatives (see the receipt). Spend the hour on a younger target. ## The practice (checklist) - [ ] **0 — The gate, and time it.** One named test, alone, from a cold clone. If this is expensive the other probes are too. ```bash go test -v -run '^TestSomethingReal$' ./pkg/... # 16s measured, cold clone, no build config cargo test -p some-crate --lib some_test # 189s cold, then sub-second ./ru