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wtf is skills?

starslingdev/skills — explained in plain English

Analysis updated 2026-05-18

11PythonAudience · ops devopsComplexity · 3/5Setup · moderate

TL;DR

A tool that audits your GitHub Actions workflows to find out why your automated code checks are slow, measuring both developer wait time and cloud computing costs separately. It produces a report with findings and prompts to help your coding assistant propose safe fixes.

Mindmap

mindmap
  root((repo))
    What it does
      Audits CI workflows
      Finds slowdown causes
      Reports wait time and cost
      Keeps time and cost separate
    How it works
      Uses real run history
      Checks 70-plus patterns
      Does not guess
      No data sent externally
    Setup needs
      GitHub CLI auth
      Python 3.9 or newer
      PyYAML library
      Installs via npx
    Use cases
      Speed up code checks
      Cut cloud computing bills
      Feed findings to AI assistant
      Save report as markdown
    Audience
      Developers
      DevOps engineers
      Team leads

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Why would anyone build with this?

REASON 1

Audit your GitHub Actions workflows to find the real causes of slow automated code checks.

REASON 2

Identify whether your CI changes are increasing developer wait time or your cloud computing bill.

REASON 3

Generate prompts to paste into your coding assistant so it can propose safe fixes for wasteful CI steps.

REASON 4

Save a markdown report of CI optimization findings directly in your project folder.

What's in the stack?

PythonPyYAMLnpxGitHub CLI

How it stacks up

starslingdev/skills2arons/llm-cliabe238/claude-video-plus
Stars111111
LanguagePythonPythonPython
Setup difficultymoderateeasyeasy
Complexity3/52/53/5
Audienceops devopsdeveloperdeveloper

Figures from each repo's GitHub metadata at analysis time.

How do you spin it up?

Difficulty · moderate Time to first run · 5min

Requires an authenticated GitHub CLI plus Python 3.9 or newer and PyYAML.

Wtf does this do

StarSling Skills is a repository that currently ships one tool, called ci-speedup. This tool audits GitHub Actions workflows, which are the automated checks that run when a developer submits code changes. The goal is to figure out why those checks are slow and produce a report explaining the actual causes of the delay. The tool measures slowness along two separate axes. The first is developer wait time, meaning the slowest checks a developer must sit through before their code can be merged. The second is runner minutes, which translates to the cloud computing bill. These two numbers are kept apart because a change might reduce the bill while adding wait time, so combining them into a single score would hide that tradeoff. The tool works from real run history pulled through the GitHub API, not from guesses or estimates. The audit draws from a catalog of over 70 optimization patterns across 14 categories. These include missing caches, redundant setup steps, sleep-based readiness checks, and unsharded test jobs. An important distinction is that the tool diagnoses problems but does not prescribe fixes. It cannot tell whether something that looks wasteful was done on purpose. Instead of generating a patch, each finding includes a prompt you can paste into your own coding assistant. That assistant then reads the actual logs and file history to propose a safe change. Installation uses a command line tool called npx. You select your coding agent, such as Claude Code, Codex, or Cursor, and the skill installs into that environment. Running it requires the GitHub command line tool to be authenticated, plus Python 3.9 or newer and a library called PyYAML. The tool samples your recent CI runs, and the process takes roughly a minute on a mid-size repository. It sends nothing to StarSling or any third party. The full report is optional and can be saved as a markdown file in your working directory.

Yoink these prompts

Prompt 1
I installed the ci-speedup skill from StarSling. Run an audit on my repository's GitHub Actions workflows and tell me which checks are causing the most developer wait time and which are costing the most runner minutes.
Prompt 2
Here is the ci-speedup report for my repo. For each finding, read the relevant workflow file and recent logs, then propose a specific safe change to reduce the slowdown without breaking existing checks.
Prompt 3
Use the ci-speedup skill to check my workflows for missing caches, redundant setup steps, and sleep-based readiness checks. Then give me the prompts it generated so I can review them with my coding assistant.
Prompt 4
I want to understand if my recent CI changes reduced my cloud bill or just added developer wait time. Run the ci-speedup audit and explain the tradeoff it found.

Frequently asked questions

wtf is skills?

A tool that audits your GitHub Actions workflows to find out why your automated code checks are slow, measuring both developer wait time and cloud computing costs separately. It produces a report with findings and prompts to help your coding assistant propose safe fixes.

What language is skills written in?

Mainly Python. The stack also includes Python, PyYAML, npx.

How hard is skills to set up?

Setup difficulty is rated moderate, with roughly 5min to a first successful run.

Who is skills for?

Mainly ops devops.

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