Guidance for writing the test before the code. Use when building new behavior or fixing a bug — write the failing test first, watch it fail for the right reason, then make it pass. Test-first is a mandate with a few stated exceptions, not loose advice; reach for it before you write the implementation, not after.
Method for finding the cause of a bug, failing test, regression, or unexplained symptom whose cause is unknown. Use when something is broken and you don't yet know why — reproduce it, narrow by halving, instrument and read live state, and repair the root rather than silencing the symptom. Not for plan-writing or building features to a known design — but a senior-implementer whose own fresh build breaks reaches for this; it is the discipline for the unknown.
Procedure for gating work with fresh, independent, lensed hunters until a CLEAN verdict, and for front-running an external automated reviewer by tuning your own hunters to the bug categories it actually finds. Use at every quality gate: spec, plan, and code or PR review. Make sure to use this whenever reviewing or QAing substantive work before it advances, scaling the depth to the stakes.
Operating manual for the top-level orchestrator the user talks to: the single agent that receives the user's asks, dispatches each piece of work at the right depth (a direct specialist for a small task, or running the `team-manager` lifecycle itself for a big chunk), monitors everything in flight, surfaces decisions one at a time, and stays free. Use this whenever acting as the user's chief of staff or orchestrator: receiving asks, choosing dispatch depth, delegating to specialists or wearing the manager hat for an epic, health-checking running work, surfacing decisions, and presenting epic-bookend briefs. Make sure to use this skill whenever coordinating or delegating work, or when the user asks for status or a decision, even if "chief of staff" isn't said.
The hat the chief of staff wears to own an epic end to end (anything bigger than one PR); the operating manual for running an epic yourself, not a separate agent. Use this whenever owning a chunk end to end: triaging it, grooming an epic into slices and dispatching workers (one writer per branch), running the spec -> plan -> build lifecycle with adversarial review until clean, owning the integration branch and the never-draft merge model, health-monitoring those workers, and keeping progress visible and durable. It is also the canonical home of the integration-branch / serial-dependent-chain / never-draft model. Make sure to use this skill whenever running a chunk, triaging a backlog, managing workers, or moving work through its lifecycle, even if the role isn't named.
The ritual for taking completed, verified work up for review. Use the moment a build is done and ready to go up: when finishing a chunk, opening or putting up a PR, or shipping a change. Open the PR first to start the external reviewer, then in parallel run a swarm of fresh independent Opus hunters over the diff, reconcile their findings with the external reviewer's into one classified list, dispatch the `steward` to own closeout (rebase, paginate/triage threads, resolve, re-verify, merge to the integration branch), routing REAL bugs to the `bug-fixer` for root-cause repair, and loop until CLEAN. Make sure to use this whenever work is finished and about to go up for review, so you find your own bugs instead of waiting on the PR queue.
Produces the per-epic brief that the chief of staff presents to the user at an epic's two bookends — a v1 architecture brief at design-done and a v2 executive brief at merge, both states in one updated file. Use this whenever an epic reaches a bookend and a brief is needed, or whenever the user or the chief of staff asks for an architecture brief, an executive brief, an epic report, or a product-and-architecture summary. The brief is a self-contained HTML document covering the work from two lenses, product and architecture, sourced from the control plane. Make sure to use this skill whenever rendering either bookend brief, and start from the bundled template rather than designing from scratch.
The single state-of-the-world document the chief of staff keeps current and reads first on every resume — a Mermaid stage-tagged tree of every in-flight thread, linking to the artifacts and per-thread status each one needs to recover. Use when initializing or updating orchestration state, on every monitor tick, and to recover after a lost session. The roadmap is the resume anchor; the per-team files are the detail. Make sure to keep it current as work moves, delegating the typing to a scribe rather than blocking on it.