Technical Leadership

# Technical Leadership

For the hands-on leader who still touches code — increasingly, with AI assistants. These prompts sit where leadership judgment meets real code: reviewing a report's work, getting oriented in unfamiliar systems, de-risking a call with a spike, stress-testing an estimate, and translating code reality up the chain.

## When to Use These

- **Reviewing your team's work:** PR review with a leadership lens, code-to-exec translation
- **Getting oriented:** Orientation brief on unfamiliar code, health check on code you own
- **De-risking a decision:** Spike plan, spike readout, technology evaluation, legacy invest/rewrite/leave
- **Committing to a plan:** Estimate sanity check before you promise a date
- **During an incident:** Fast code-path triage
- **Setting team norms:** AI coding guidelines, AI agent workflow design

## Prompts in This Category

| # | Prompt | When |
|---|--------|------|
| 01 | PR Review for Leaders | Reviewing a report's pull request |
| 02 | Codebase Orientation Brief | Getting up to speed on unfamiliar code |
| 03 | Codebase Health Check | A periodic read on a system you own |
| 04 | Prototype Spike Plan | Framing a throwaway experiment before you build it |
| 05 | Spike Readout | Converting a finished spike into a decision |
| 06 | Tech Evaluation Spike | Judging a library/framework/vendor by running it |
| 07 | Legacy Code Assessment | Deciding invest / rewrite / leave on inherited code |
| 08 | Estimation Sanity Check | Before committing a date you didn't produce |
| 09 | Incident Code Triage | Reading a failing code path under pressure |
| 10 | Code to Exec Translation | Explaining a technical change to non-engineers |
| 11 | AI Coding Guidelines | Setting team norms for AI-assisted coding |
| 12 | AI Agent Workflow Design | Wiring AI agents into the dev loop deliberately |

Each has an agent-ready [skill](../../skills/technical-leadership/) counterpart that gathers inputs and produces the finished artifact.