Dependency Updater (softaworks) vs Security Review (affaan-m)
Dependency Updater (softaworks) and Security Review (affaan-m) are both Security skills, so an agent choosing between them is matching on descriptions that overlap. Here is where they actually diverge.
Dependency Updater
softaworks
Works over a project's dependency manifest — detecting the language, applying the safe minor and patch bumps on its own, pausing on major versions, and running that ecosystem's vulnerability audit (npm audit, pip-audit, govulncheck, cargo audit and the like) to flag known-vulnerable packages. It secures the supply chain around your code, not the code itself: it does not scan your own source for bugs, write detection rules, or reason about a design's threats.
3 scenarios in the bank answer to it
Security Review
affaan-m/ecc
Helps developers implement secure features by listing concrete checks and recommended patterns for authentication, input handling, secret management, API endpoints, and payment or sensitive flows. Unlike similarly named tools that scan code or produce vulnerability audits, this one focuses on design-time guidance and implementation checklists — it does not run automated SAST, assign severity scores, or perform penetration-style audits of diffs.
1 scenario in the bank answer to it
What is the difference between Dependency Updater (softaworks) and Security Review (affaan-m)?
- Dependency Updater (softaworks)
- Works over a project's dependency manifest — detecting the language, applying the safe minor and patch bumps on its own, pausing on major versions, and running that ecosystem's vulnerability audit (npm audit, pip-audit, govulncheck, cargo audit and the like) to flag known-vulnerable packages. It secures the supply chain around your code, not the code itself: it does not scan your own source for bugs, write detection rules, or reason about a design's threats.
- Security Review (affaan-m)
- Helps developers implement secure features by listing concrete checks and recommended patterns for authentication, input handling, secret management, API endpoints, and payment or sensitive flows. Unlike similarly named tools that scan code or produce vulnerability audits, this one focuses on design-time guidance and implementation checklists — it does not run automated SAST, assign severity scores, or perform penetration-style audits of diffs.
Should I use Dependency Updater or Security Review (affaan-m)?
The clearest answer is a situation each one is unambiguously right for. Both of these are drawn from the game's question bank.
Reach for Dependency Updater when
A beloved open-source gadget is stuck on an ancient Rails release. The maintainer wants to float through incremental updates and sniff for tainted third-party libraries before the morning build kicks off.
This skill specializes in lazily massaging a repository's dependency graph—automatically elevating low-risk point improvements, parking large jumps, then querying the ecosystem's own defect registry for poisoned artifacts. It wins because the scenario is purely about keeping third-party libraries healthy before a build, not about hunting source-code bugs, writing detection rules, or surfacing failures correctly.
Reach for Security Review (affaan-m) when
I'm about to design a new login + payment flow and want a clear, practical list of secure patterns, do/avoid rules, and concrete checks I should follow as I build the feature so we don't bake in mistakes. I don't want someone to comb the whole repo for every weakness, produce a full cross-system compliance report, or only review a single outstanding change.
Winner: security-review-affaan-m gives the practical, design-time guidance this person needs — concrete patterns and checks for authentication, input handling, secret management, endpoints and sensitive flows to follow while writing the feature. What it does that the others do not is focus on implementation guidance up front rather than producing vulnerability scan results, a prioritized compliance audit, or a narrow review of a pending change. Most tempting wrong answer: security-review-getsentry — it finds and labels code-level problems, so it looks useful, but its output is about surfacing and scoring findings from existing source code rather than giving the developer a checklist of patterns and design-time rules to follow. (Other traps: security-reviewer-jeffallan would overdeliver a prioritized, compliance-style audit across code, infra and deps — useful but the wrong scope and heavier than needed; security-review-waybarrios only examines the specific unmerged change and focuses on high-confidence exploit paths, so it won't provide the broad, feature-level implementation guidance the author wants.)
What they have in common
Both are filed under Security, the axis along which they collide. That shared ground is what makes an agent pick between them on description alone — and what makes it pick wrong.
Nearby comparisons
Reading the difference is not the same as spotting it at speed. That is the game.
Today's session