mothership

You MUST use this before any creative work - creating features, building components, adding functionality, or modifying behavior. Explores user intent, requirements and design before implementation.

Use when working in a workspace with mothership.yaml — provides phase-based workflow, coordinated worktrees, dependency-ordered execution, healthchecks, and context recovery via the mship CLI

Use to receive and answer durable phone messages (the mship mailbox) while a session is idle — keep a background `mship inbox wait` armed and re-arm after each reply.

Use when you have a written implementation plan to execute in a separate session with review checkpoints

Use when executing implementation plans with independent tasks in the current session

Use when starting feature work that needs isolation from current workspace or before executing implementation plans - creates isolated git worktrees with smart directory selection and safety verification

Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code

Use when facing 2+ independent tasks that can be worked on without shared state or sequential dependencies

Use when completing tasks, implementing major features, or before merging to verify work meets requirements

Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code

Use when starting any conversation — establishes how to find and use mothership-bundled skills, requiring Skill tool invocation before ANY response including clarifying questions

Use when about to claim work is complete, fixed, or passing, before committing or creating PRs - requires running verification commands and confirming output before making any success claims; evidence before assertions always

Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment

Use when implementation is complete, all tests pass, and you need to decide how to integrate the work - guides completion of development work by presenting structured options for merge, PR, or cleanup

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes