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create-technical-spike

Time-boxed technical spike documents

create-technical-spike is an agent skill from the github/awesome-copilot collection that writes time-boxed technical spike documents. A spike is a short, focused investigation done before development starts, to answer a critical question that the team cannot decide without evidence, such as whether an API can do what is needed or whether a design will meet a performance target. Each spike document has a clear objective, the research questions to answer, an investigation plan with a time limit, the deliverables expected, and a decision framework that says what the findings would mean for the choice. The skill saves each spike as its own file in a docs/spikes folder by default, with a name in the form category-short-description-spike.md, so the spikes can be found and compared later. Keeping spikes time-boxed stops research from running on without a decision, which is the common failure of exploratory work. The skill is useful for engineering leads and architects who need to settle an uncertain technical choice before committing to it. The spike's results should be written up honestly, including what could not be determined, and the decision should be recorded by the people responsible for it. The skill is installed with the skills CLI from the github/awesome-copilot repository. Its skills.sh page showed about 9.0K installs, with Gen Agent Trust Hub and Socket passing and Snyk showing a warning at the time of the scan.