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Contributing

Contributions to Iceage are welcome.

The project is intentionally small and focused: improve the prompt, improve the developer experience, keep the behavior predictable.

Small focused change > big rewrite. Iceage likes simple.

How to Contribute

1. Fork the repository

Fork the repository and clone your fork locally:

git clone https://github.com/YOUR_USERNAME/iceage.git
cd iceage

2. Edit the source of truth

For changes to the main Iceage behavior, edit only:

skills/iceage/SKILL.md

This is the single source of truth for the Iceage prompt.

Do not manually edit generated copies.

3. Test your change

Run Iceage with your updated prompt and compare its output against the previous behavior.

Focus on concrete improvements such as:

  • Better information density
  • Less unnecessary verbosity
  • More consistent technical language
  • Better handling of edge cases
  • Fewer unnecessary tokens
  • No loss of important technical information

Avoid changes that make Iceage shorter at the cost of correctness or clarity.

4. Open a Pull Request

Your PR should include a small, concrete before/after example.

Use this structure:

## Before

> What Iceage says now.

## After

> What Iceage says with this change.

## Why

One sentence explaining why the new behavior is better.

Keep the example representative of the behavior you are changing.

Source of Truth

The following files are automatically synchronized by CI after changes are merged:

skills/iceage/SKILL.md
plugins/iceage/skills/iceage/SKILL.md
.cursor/skills/iceage/SKILL.md
iceage.skill

Only edit:

skills/iceage/SKILL.md

Do not edit the generated copies directly.

CI will synchronize them after the PR is merged.

Compress Skill

The compression skill has its own source of truth.

If you are modifying iceage-compress, edit:

skills/compress/SKILL.md

This is the only file you need to change for the compress skill.

Do not manually modify generated copies.

What Makes a Good Contribution?

Good Iceage changes are usually:

  • Small
  • Focused
  • Easy to understand
  • Backed by a concrete example
  • Easy to evaluate
  • Useful across different coding tasks

A good change should answer:

Does this remove unnecessary words without removing useful information?

If yes, it is probably a good fit for Iceage.

What to Avoid

Avoid large prompt rewrites without a specific problem to solve.

Avoid changes that:

  • Make responses cryptic
  • Remove important technical context
  • Reduce security warnings
  • Break code examples
  • Introduce unnecessary complexity
  • Change unrelated behavior
  • Optimize for token count alone

Shorter is not automatically better.

The goal is:

Less words
    +
Same meaning
    +
Same technical accuracy

Ideas & Starter Tasks

Looking for something small to work on?

Check the issues labeled:

good first issue

These are a good starting point for first-time contributors.

Pull Request Checklist

Before opening a PR:

  • Change is focused on one improvement
  • skills/iceage/SKILL.md is the only Iceage prompt source modified
  • Before/after example is included
  • One-sentence rationale is included
  • Technical meaning is preserved
  • No unnecessary complexity was introduced
  • Generated files were not manually edited

For compress-skill changes:

  • skills/compress/SKILL.md is the source of truth
  • Generated copies were not manually edited

Philosophy

Iceage is deliberately simple.

If a change can be solved with a few lines instead of a large abstraction, prefer the few lines.

Small focused change > big rewrite.

Thanks for helping make AI coding agents less verbose, more precise, and easier to work with. 🦣