| name | drill |
| description | Run the full dark-factory feature pipeline for a prompt — spec, plan, clarify, adversarial assay, ticket creation, and foreman dispatch. Use when the user wants to build a feature end-to-end with derrick. Triggers include "/drill", "derrick drill", "build the X feature", or a natural-language feature description handed to derrick. |
Drill — the feature pipeline
/drill <prompt> drives the entire dark-factory pipeline for one
feature description: spec → plan → clarify → assay → tickets →
foreman dispatch. The slash command is intentionally thin — it just
resolves to derrick run drill --prompt "..." — and defers here for
the workflow narrative. The user never sees the underlying tools;
all output and questions are in derrick's voice.
See DESIGN.md §5.3 for the authoritative flow.
When to use
- The user describes a feature and wants derrick to build it.
- The user types
/drill <prompt> or runs derrick drill "<prompt>".
- A halted run needs resuming (see Resume below).
Invocation
derrick drill "build a webhook ingest endpoint with idempotent dedupe"
Or via Claude Code:
/drill build a webhook ingest endpoint with idempotent dedupe
The positional prompt is shorthand; derrick run drill --prompt "..."
is the canonical underlying form. add is a hidden, deprecated alias
for drill and the runner still accepts the legacy "add-feature"
pipeline_id so older run manifests stay resumable (D64).
The eight stages
The pipeline runs eight stages in sequence. Each stage that surfaces
output does so in a clean, styled terminal UI. Stages that block on
user input wait indefinitely; autonomous stages show a spinner then a
summary. Every step logs to .derrick/runs/<utc-ts>/step-<id>.log.
- Specify — runs
speckit specify internally, then shows a clean
summary of what derrick understood. Waits for an explicit yes/no;
on no, takes a free-text correction and re-runs specify.
- Plan — runs
speckit plan; shows a brief human-readable plan
summary. No confirmation here — the assay (stage 5) is the gate.
- Clarify — runs
speckit clarify interactively, streaming
questions to the terminal and capturing answers in-session.
- Apply clarifications — an in-process step that folds the
answers into the plan and shows a diff-style summary of the change.
- Assay — the adversarial review gate. One or more reviewers
critique the plan; the pipeline refuses to proceed past an open
blocking finding.
- Summary and confirmation — derrick presents the final plan and
asks the user to confirm before any tickets are created.
- Task and agent generation — decomposes the plan into tickets
in a batch on the substrate.
- Begin work (detachable) — the foreman dispatches tickets to
hands. Detachable: the user can leave and re-attach with
derrick observe / derrick status.
Failure and resume
Failure of any step halts the pipeline with a numbered error and the
exact resume command:
derrick run drill --resume-from <step>
When a prompt is re-run without --resume-from or --force, drill
normalises the prompt to a stable key and auto-resumes a matching
incomplete run rather than starting fresh (avoids ticket-ID
collisions). --force starts a brand-new run and records
resume_of: <old_run_id> for lineage.
Skip flags
Stages can be skipped per-run: --no-clarify, --no-assay,
--no-github-issues, and the general --skip <step> / --unskip <step>. --dry-run previews every state-mutating step without
committing it.
What this skill does NOT do
- Replace
derrick init. The repo must be initialised first.
- Add code itself — it orchestrates the host CLIs and the foreman.
Reference
- DESIGN.md §5.3 —
derrick drill, the feature pipeline.
- DESIGN.md §5.2 —
derrick init (must run first).
- D64 — the
add → drill rename and deprecated aliases.
.claude/commands/drill.md — the thin command that defers here.
