What is backend-skills?

backend-skills is a collection of twelve add-on skills for Claude Code, the command line AI coding assistant, aimed at backend engineering work. Each skill acts like a specialized senior engineer focused on one narrow task, such as reviewing a design proposal, generating a database schema from a written specification, or triaging a messy set of log files to explain what went wrong. The skills are organized into four stages of a feature's life. In the requirements stage, skills help find gaps or ambiguity in an idea before it is designed. In the design stage, skills turn a written proposal into a real database schema, an API specification, or a visual diagram of how data relates. In the implementation stage, skills review existing code for security problems, performance issues, or messy architecture, and can generate documentation for an API. In the operations stage, skills help make sense of log files, either as a one time report or through an interactive back and forth, and help write up a summary after something breaks in production. Each skill combines two things: a plain script that handles the mechanical, repeatable parts of the job, like parsing files or drawing diagrams, and the AI model itself, which handles judgment calls that cannot be reduced to a fixed procedure. The project states that any detail the AI infers rather than reads directly from the input is clearly marked as an assumption rather than presented as fact. Installing a skill does not require cloning the repository. A single command line download script can install one skill, several by name, an entire category, or everything at once, and re-running the same command updates an already installed skill. Skills can also be installed manually by copying folders into a specific Claude Code configuration directory. Once installed, a skill can be triggered either by describing what you want in plain language or by directly naming it with a slash command. The project includes automated tests for the scripted parts of each skill and is released under the MIT license.