Merge-SAFETY of an existing diff — yours before you push, or a PR you review: blast radius, tests to run, a broken contract (--edit-check=SYM), branch conflicts and landing order, unmerged work stranded on old branches, which ref defines it. Code QUALITY →…
Maintenance risk in code you did NOT write — inheriting a module, planning a refactor, a suspected god object, 'what's gnarly / where's the rot / safe to touch?': hotspots, dead or inactive code, switches/defaults (--flags), clones, a function's real shape,…
Code QUALITY of what YOU just wrote, before you commit or say 'done', or verifying a cleanup: --quality-delta lists what got WORSE in 10 kinds and exits 2 only when pre-existing code got materially worse; which restructuring a measured shape (humps/deep, a…
You can NAME the symbol: who calls it, what it calls, the path from A to B, its full body, or an exact literal/regex match. 'Safe to change or rename X — what breaks downstream?' = the transitive blast radius, not 1-hop callers. Three or more symbols →…
Landing COLD in an unfamiliar repo or subsystem, or about to open several files for one question: map first, read only what it ranks highest — main subsystems, entry points, 'how does X work / where is Y'. Also recover context after compaction, retrieve saved…
Wire ripwire into an agent as an MCP server — `ripwire wrap AGENT` (Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Gemini…) — and choose the server verb mid-task. Also tool HEALTH: a symbol you expected is missing from the ranked output, the index feels stale after a rebase,…
Start HERE when unsure which ripwire skill fits, or asked 'how do I use ripwire / where do I start'. A moment→skill map, cold start to handoff, plus the two reflexes that leak most: --exemplar before you write, --quality-delta before you call it done. One hop…
About to write ONE symbol (even a 'quick' one-liner) or add a dependency: reuse before you reinvent. Finds the building block that already exists, the house pattern to imitate, the duplicate you'd recreate, a vendored dependency. An interface or whole feature…