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Drupal Canvas

By penyaskito , 18 April, 2026

Your SKILLs don't matter: deterministic checks do

Your SKILLs don't matter

Or better said: you are sharing them with the wrong goal.

Every other LinkedIn/Slack post is talking about LLMs. But most specifically, it's dozens of developers sharing their SKILLs repo as the best SKILLs ever that will make you write the perfect code.

I've written only a very few of them, and I am already tired of copying them over from project to project. So I might create the next best-drupal-skills-ever repo. And you might look at it. But I'm 90% sure it won't work for you. Because my preferences and code quirks aren't yours.

Code standards should be (and they are) enforced. We have PHP_CodeSniffer for that. We have PHPStan for that. Don't write a non-deterministic skill. If you really care about enforcing it, write a deterministic rule. LLMs are pretty good at creating these.

If you can't write a deterministic rule, or you think it's not worth it, probably it's just your personal preference.

Deterministic checks (a Drupal Canvas story)

The Drupal Canvas module has created quite a few phpstan custom rules and phpcs custom rules. 

There's some team consensus on them. We've suffered bugs because of their absence. Most of the time, they are caught in code reviews, but that requires an extra back and forth. With LLMs becoming more and more popular, I'm not discovering anything new to you: the open source bottleneck is code reviews, not creating code. You should avoid at all costs an extra code review.

As an example, we are disallowing implementing hook_schema for Drupal Canvas and its submodules. In this case, we are leaping ahead of Drupal core, but we don't know when that will land and become the standard way in the Drupal ecosystem. We just think it benefits us already, and that becomes our standard. And we deterministically enforce it. Having this as a SKILL would be just useless context 95% of the time, burning your tokens, and only applied to AI-generated code, not any human written code: humans still write code, right? RIGHT?

Share your SKILLs

Don't get me wrong, share your SKILLs. Use permissive licenses for them. Share knowledge with others and learn from others.

But at the end of the day, when the hype ends, I'd expect SKILLs repos to become like dotfiles repos. Everyone has their preferences. Each project has different needs. Starting from someone else's might be a good starting point if you aren't familiar with the tech. But at the end, you MUST customize them to your own preferences and your project needs.

Tags

  • Drupal
  • Drupal AI
  • Drupal Canvas
  • Drupal planet
  • AI
  • LLMs
  • SKILLs
  • phpcs
  • PHPStan
By penyaskito , 4 April, 2026

Quarterly Contributions summary for 2026 Q1

One year ago I started tracking my own contributions to Drupal.org and posting a report on my Mastodon account. See the last quarter of 2025 report as an example. The goal is not to flex (it would be cheating given that Acquia sponsors me for working on Drupal Canvas almost full time); and this is far from being a good way of tracking contributions or your own productivity, but it's better than nothing. 

Still, it helps me evaluate where I've been focusing (out of necessity, from being nerdsniped, or just for fun), and check if I need to balance that for my "volunteer" contributions. In this last year I've been appointed as Drupal CMS committer (which includes maintainership of 20+ projects 😱😱😱), and Drupal Core subsystem maintainer for Content Translation and Language modules. So tracking where my efforts go is really helpful for self-accountability.

And to be fair, I spent more time maintaining this blog than writing, so finding a new topic that is recurrent is a good way to force me to keep it up to date 😅.

In the last 4 quarters I've been tracking this, it's been ~1 credit per day among all projects. Last quarter I had credits at 1295 issues. As of now, it's 1376. So 81 new credits, vs 93 last quarter, which is a little below 1 credit/day.

Breaking those down:

Canvas: 143 (+61)
Core: 150 (+8)
CMS*: 42 (+4)
Dashboard: 61 (+3)

I also enjoy contributing to projects like DDEV, which helps me learn Golang and clear my mind from working on the same stack. Recently I've been working on Add --project/-p flag to ddev exec command to target a named DDEV project from any directory and it was just merged! 

And I've been pushing a bit this quarter to keep the Drupal Canvas development DDEV add-on up to date, with several improvements and releases.

Hope to write again before July 1st!

Happy coding! 🎉🎉

Tags

  • contributing
  • quarterly-report
  • Drupal
  • Drupal Core
  • Drupal Canvas
  • DDEV
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