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Use when deciding which workflow or skill should handle a task, especially when repo-local, dotfiles, process, and app-native workflows may overlap.
Install with Codex or Claude Copy this prompt, paste it into Codex, Claude, or another assistant, and let it review the skill page and install it for you.
Based on SOC occupation classification
Use when ingesting, refreshing, listing, searching, or deleting a local corpus with Blackbird code search and `gh blackbird search --fileset`.
Use when reaching for `gh blackbird` (Blackbird code search) for cross-repo lexical, symbol, or semantic search on GitHub — finding callers, ownership, or how systems work without cloning.
Use when creating a GitHub pull request, or when updating an existing PR's title or body so it matches what the code actually does.
Use when authoring or substantially editing a design doc, architecture doc, or subsystem explanation — the "here's what's there and why" companion to an ADR's terse decision record.
Use when creating a repo-tracked multi-agent planning PR for a large project, especially when phases, living docs, parallel agent prompts, and cross-PR coordination are needed.
Use when about to call a library, crate, or framework API you haven't verified, when a dependency's behavior is surprising, when training-data memory might be stale, or when investigating how a dependency actually behaves.
| name | choosing-workflow |
| disabled | true |
| description | Use when deciding which workflow or skill should handle a task, especially when repo-local, dotfiles, process, and app-native workflows may overlap. |
Choose the narrowest workflow that fits. Do not load competing skills just because names or triggers are similar.
AGENTS.md, and repo-local conventions win.This skill resolves precedence when multiple workflows could apply. For the per-trigger "when X happens, load skill Y" index — including discipline, authoring, and PR/shipping workflows — see the Development discipline, Authoring artifacts, and PR & shipping workflows lists in copilot/copilot-instructions.md. Don't duplicate those triggers here.
Keep runtime/orchestration procedures out of dotfiles unless they add personal cross-repo judgment. Session execution, subagent dispatch, worktree setup, branch finishing, and PR orchestration belong in the app/runtime layer when available.
Keep project-specific operational knowledge in the project repo. Dotfiles skills should not encode one repo's labels, bots, branches, runbooks, dashboards, or deployment scripts.
Some dotfiles skills exist as explicit fallbacks for tasks the user does across many repos but where individual repos may provide a specialized version. When both exist, the repo-local skill always wins — its project-specific rules, runbooks, dashboards, and conventions trump the generic fallback. Use the dotfiles fallback only when no repo skill applies.
| Task | Repo skill if it exists | Otherwise |
|---|---|---|
| Editing Rust | repo's rust-coding-skill (or equivalent) | code-rust |
| Editing Go | repo's go-coding-skill (or equivalent) | code-go |
| Investigating an alert or incident | repo's alert/incident skill | alert-investigator |
| Writing an incident postmortem | repo's incident-postmortem (or equivalent) | incident-postmortem |
| Updating dependencies | repo's update-deps (or equivalent) | deps-update |
| Assessing risk profile of a PR | repo's risk-review, deploy-risk, or release-readiness skill | pr-risk-check |
| Deprecating or removing an API, feature, or system | repo's deprecation or release-management skill | deprecating-and-removing |
Authoring rule for these skills: their description must say "Use when... and the repository has no equivalent skill of its own." That signals fallback role at discovery time even though current tooling can't enumerate other skills to enforce it.
A small number of dotfiles skills are pure cross-repo personal workflow — they have no repo-level specialization and should not be copied into any project's .copilot/skills/ or .github/skills/. Doing so causes drift and confuses discovery.
blackbird — purely a personal workflow over gh blackbird. If a repo wants users to learn the workflow, link to it from the repo's docs rather than vendoring it.pr-author, pr-merge-readiness, daily-handoff, thinking-about, copy-editor, delegating-plan-work, planning-multi-agent-projects, skill-author, choosing-workflow — personal workflow only.