Individual skill

poka-yoke

Mistake-proof code so misuse cannot be expressed, rather than warning against it. Use when designing an interface, schema, or state machine and the user wants it hard to get wrong ("make invalid states unrepresentable", "so callers cannot screw it up", "type-safe API", "pit of success"); when auditing existing code for footguns ("what could bite us here", "what is easy to misuse", "poka-yoke this repo", "review this diff for ways to get it wrong"); or when a bug has recurred and the fix must close the class rather than the case ("make sure this never happens again", "this is the third time"). Especially for money, auth, permissions, deletion, migrations, and pipelines where failure is silent. Classifies every finding by what happens when the mistake occurs and how the device notices, which is what keeps it from collapsing into generic code review.

skills/poka-yoke/SKILL.md

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Repository last updated
Nov 6, 2026
License
MIT

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# Poka-Yoke: Make the Mistake Unsayable

**People will always make mistakes. That is not the problem worth solving. The problem is
letting a mistake become a defect.**

Shigeo Shingo, a Japanese industrial engineer, worked this out on a switch assembly line in
1961. Workers kept forgetting a spring. The fix was not a reminder: the job was split so the
worker first laid both springs in a dish, then fitted them from the dish. A spring left over
was the error announcing itself, before the unit could move on.

The dish is a device. "Please remember the spring" is not.

## The line that does most of the work