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 a design, plan, or decision needs adversarial scrutiny before proceeding. Interrogates every branch of the decision tree, providing recommended answers and forcing explicit agreement or pushback. Triggers on "grill me", "stress test this", "poke holes", "challenge this design", or when brainstorming/writing-plans suggests review.
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes
Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code
Use when checking if beads-superpowers is outdated, before a plugin release, or when auditing for missing capabilities — covers upstream drift, test execution, documentation, plugin health, and content integrity
Use when implementation on a branch is complete and it is about to be merged or PR'd — or when finishing-a-development-branch reaches its docs-audit gate — and after code changes are committed, to ensure all project documentation accurately reflects shipped code. Covers README, ARCHITECTURE, CONTRIBUTING, CHANGELOG, CLAUDE.md, TODOS, and VERSION files. Triggers on "update docs", "sync documentation", "post-ship docs", "document release", "documentation audit".
Use when beads/Dolt database initialization fails, when bd commands return errors about missing databases, when setting up beads in a new project, or when recovering from diverged Dolt history. Handles fresh init, bootstrap from remote, and recovery workflows.
Use when writing or substantially rewriting human-facing prose: documentation, README, guides, blog posts, emails, Slack messages, PR descriptions, release notes, or any text a human will read. Not for code comments, commit messages, or agent-to-agent communication.