My method, as a skill.
Run it before you hire me.
/northstar is how I work, written down. It lands in your repo, senses the environment, and executes in small visible loops. Free, because I trust it enough to let your team run it without me.
/northstar: the consultant,
without the invoice
Give it a problem area and it owns it end to end. It reads your repo, drafts a plan you can redirect, then works in loops. Specialised problems get delegated to the sub-skills below, each of which also runs on its own.
Makes its own plan
Senses the environment, states its read, proposes a plan you confirm.
Talks like a colleague
Warm, hedged PR descriptions. Disagreement with evidence, never corporate.
Knows more than dashboards
Stakeholder work, executive packs, greenfield setups, funnel instincts.
Keeps learning
Proposes a PR to its own skill file whenever it hits a gap.
A builder does not start by writing code
It starts the way a good consultant starts: read, then ask.
Inspect
Reads your repo, conventions and access first. Never asks what the code already answers.
Interview
Five to eight questions that encode a decade of scar tissue, not "what is your BI tool".
Generate
Writes a SKILL.md with your real paths and rules. Versioned like any other code.
Learn
Hits a gap, asks a human, proposes a PR to itself with what it just learned.
Twelve builders. One protocol.
One job each. /northstar delegates to them, but every one also runs on its own.
Diagnose a broken chart properly
Traces the break to the dbt model, checks for fanout, drafts the PR in your review style.
Migrate between any two BI tools
Asks which tools and what access it has, then builds conversion rules around that pair.
KEEP, MIGRATE or ARCHIVE, with evidence
Issues verdicts from your real usage data. Nobody misses dashboards they can't name.
New dbt models that pass review first time
Learns your conventions from your best models, then checks a duplicate does not exist.
End the "which number is right" debate
Traces two figures to where their definitions diverge, in language a CFO accepts.
The gate that keeps a clean estate clean
A named owner, traceable metrics, a lifecycle stage, before anything gets published.
Training built on your own backlog
Session one ends with a merged PR, not a slide deck.
Docs welded to the code
Built from the questions your team actually asks, with a staleness check on every page.
A first responder for your support channel
Classifies questions, delegates to your other skills, routes to the right owner.
The board pack, ready on day one
Assembles the pack from governed metrics only. No ad-hoc number reaches the deck.
Turn vague requests into decisions
Makes every request state the decision it serves before it enters the queue.
Stop the estate rotting back
Draft, Verified, Drifted, Archived. The audit is an event. Rot is a process.
Ten minutes of questions.
A skill your team keeps.
The questions are the product. Anyone can ask what your BI tool is. A builder asks which models must never be auto-fixed.
❯ /build-fix-chart
Inspecting repository… found 2 dbt projects, Lightdash meta blocks,
CODEOWNERS on /models/finance. 3 of 8 sampled models lack unique
tests on primary keys, fanout risk noted.
Q1. When a chart breaks, where does the report land first?
❯ #analytics-support
Q6. Which models must never be auto-fixed?
❯ anything under models/finance/
Writing .claude/skills/fix-chart/SKILL.md, with models/finance/
on the blocklist and diagnoses formatted for #analytics-support.
Because the skill is the easy half
Plenty of people will tell you their AI is safe to trust. I would rather you read mine. If the free version makes your team faster, you have just previewed how I work. Here is what that preview does not include.
What the Foundry gives you
- A working skill for one real problem, today
- Full source, no lock-in and nothing phoning home
- The exact interview questions that make it yours
- Free forever. No call required
What only the engagement adds
- Shadowing your analysts to find where the hours actually go
- Training every analyst until they ship something real
- An ambassador programme that keeps adoption alive after I leave
- A skill tuned from weeks inside your workflows, not an afternoon
Run a builder. Then tell me what it got wrong.
When your team wants the version built from weeks inside your workflows, that starts with a 30-minute call.
/plugin marketplace add NorthStar-Analytics-LTD/skill-foundry
/plugin install skill-foundry@northstar-analytics
Prefer a one-off copy? Download the .zip instead.
The free edge of my BI Platform Migration work: the same Claude Code skills I build inside engagements.