/health-check — 8-Dimension Project Assessment

What

Runs a data-driven health assessment across 8 dimensions, each graded A-F with the specific data points that produced the grade, and rolls them into a GPA. Gut feeling is not a grade: every dimension uses MCP tools or CLI commands, and every grade below A comes with specific, prioritized, effort-estimated fixes — "add test classes for OrderService, PaymentProcessor, ShippingCalculator" is actionable; "improve test coverage" is not.

This skill owns the canonical grading system for the kit. The full rubrics, GPA scale, and report template live in references/grading-rubric.md — load that file when running an assessment.

Tone is diagnostic, not punitive: a C grade is an improvement path, not a failure.

When

• Onboarding to an unfamiliar or new project — set the baseline
• "How healthy is this?", "grade this project", "codebase review", "report card"
• Pre-release quality gate, or monthly/quarterly maintenance review
• After a cleanup sprint (/de-sloppify) — re-grade to show progress
• Tech-debt prioritization — lowest grades get the next sprint's attention

How

Step 1: Choose Scope

Step 2: Run the Dimensions

Read references/grading-rubric.md for the grade thresholds, then collect data per dimension. For deep code-quality dimensions, delegate to the code-reviewer agent with the code-review skill.

Step 2.5: Triage Gate (before any grade is assigned)

Detector output is evidence, not a grade. Pass every finding through this gate first — it is what stops a noisy count becoming a wrong letter.

1. Read summary, not the violation list. summary.byId is complete even when the list is truncated. Never sample a truncated list and extrapolate.
2. Drop suppressed. Record the count and summary.suppressionConfig in the report so suppression stays visible.
3. Set aside medium. These are review items, not grade inputs. Summarise them by category; do not fix or count them.
4. Grade high only. These are wrong regardless of context.
5. Check invariants. If a signal contradicts something the target repo's CLAUDE.md documents as deliberate, the invariant wins — verify before grading.
6. Read before asserting. Never describe a finding you have not opened. If you cannot open all of them, report the ones you did and say so.

Fill in the triage table from references/grading-rubric.md as you go. If the table cannot be filled, the dimension is not ready to grade.

Step 3: Grade and Aggregate

Apply the rubric thresholds exactly — never grade on a curve ("pretty good for a project this size" is how standards erode; 15 warnings is a C regardless of project size). Convert to GPA (A=4.0 … F=0.0), averaging only the dimensions actually graded — a dimension marked "Not assessed" is excluded from the GPA, never scored as an F.

Step 4: Report

Produce the report card from the template in references/grading-rubric.md: grades table with key findings, overall GPA, and priority recommendations — each with named types/files, priority order, and effort estimates. If a previous report exists, append the trend comparison table.

Example

User: /health-check

Claude: Running full 8-dimension assessment...

| Dimension | Grade | Key Finding |
|-----------|-------|-------------|
| Build Health | A | 0 errors, 2 warnings |
| Code Quality | B | 3 high-confidence findings in 4.2K lines; 31 medium untriaged |
| Architecture | A | Clean direction, 0 cycles |
| Test Coverage | Not assessed | Integration-driven suite — structural metric invalid |
| Dead Code | B | 5 unused methods (79 convention-discovered, not counted) |
| API Surface | B | 2 overexposed service types |
| Security | A | 0 vulnerable packages |
| Documentation | D | 12/30 public APIs documented |

Overall GPA: 3.1 (B) — averaged over 7 graded dimensions.

Triage: 44 AP005 raw → all log-and-rethrow wrappers (medium); 2 AP004 real.

Priority: (1) `SystemSeeder` → `TimeProvider`, ~15 min; (2) XML docs on the 8
endpoint classes, ~1 day; (3) review the 44 catch blocks or suppress by path.

Related

• references/grading-rubric.md — canonical rubrics, GPA scale, report template
• /de-sloppify — cleanup pipeline for the issues a health check surfaces
• /security-scan — deep 6-layer scan behind Dimension 7
• /code-review — per-change review (this skill grades the whole project)
• /verify — pass/fail pipeline for a change set, not a graded assessment