| name | coauthor-brief |
| description | Generate a co-author / collaborator handoff brief for a multi-author, multi-machine project — summarizing what changed since the last brief (git delta), the current state of each artifact (manuscript, analysis, slides), open questions, how to reproduce locally, and any restricted-data access steps. Use when user says "coauthor brief", "handoff brief", "bring my coauthor up to speed", "what changed since last week", "onboard a collaborator", "write a handoff for [name]", or before sending a co-author the repo. NOT a commit or a checkpoint — it is the cross-machine, cross-person summary `meta-governance.md` only partially covers. |
| author | Claude Code Academic Workflow |
| version | 1.0.0 |
| argument-hint | [--since <tag|date|Ndays>] [--for <collaborator-name>] [--no-data-section] |
| disable-model-invocation | true |
| allowed-tools | ["Read","Write","Glob","Grep","Bash"] |
| effort | medium |
/coauthor-brief — Collaborator Handoff Brief
Produce a single Markdown brief a co-author (or your future self on another machine) can read in a few minutes to know what changed, where each artifact stands, what's blocked, and how to run the pipeline locally — including restricted-data access steps a new collaborator needs. meta-governance.md covers the memory side of cross-machine work (what syncs via git, what stays in gitignored personal-memory.md); this skill covers the human side: the per-person, per-session handoff.
Core principle: /checkpoint is for you resuming; /coauthor-brief is for someone else starting. The first answers "where am I?"; the second answers "what do I need to know to take over a piece of this?"
When to use
- Before sending a co-author the repo (or a PR / branch) and you want them oriented, not archaeologizing the git log.
- Onboarding a new RA / collaborator who needs the reproduce-locally and restricted-data steps in one place.
- Periodic sync on a long multi-author project — "here's the delta since the last brief."
- Cross-machine handoff — finishing on the office desktop, picking up on the laptop, or handing the analysis half to a co-author who runs Stata while you run R.
When NOT to use
- For your own resume-point — use
/checkpoint.
- For distilling a noisy session before auto-compact — use
/compress-session.
- For the commit message itself — that goes through
/commit.
Phases
Phase 0 — Determine the "since" point
Resolve the delta window, in this priority order:
--since <arg> if given — a git tag, an ISO date, or Ndays (e.g. --since v1.2, --since 2026-05-01, --since 14days).- Else, the last brief —
ls -t quality_reports/handoffs/*.md | head -1; use the date in its filename as the floor.
- Else, fall back to 14 days and say so in the brief (an unbounded
git log is noise, not signal).
