Use when starting any non-trivial feature, issue, or objective — BEFORE designing or coding — and again AFTER implementing, to audit it. Design mode runs iterative Socratic discovery (caveats, rabbit holes, blast radius), then plans and chains the right lenses. Audit mode re-runs the session's lens plan against the implemented code and verifies it against the dossier's recorded decisions. Trigger phrases - "let's build", "add feature", "how should we approach", "audit what we built", "review the implementation".
The Lens of Observability — Socratic battery over operational recovery and visibility for money flows, state machines, webhooks, and background jobs. Use for anything where a lost external event or a stalled multi-step flow can strand a user (payments, webhooks, onboarding funnels, queues, crons). Modes - design (questions to you) and audit (questions to the code).
The Lens of Security — Socratic question battery over sessions, auth, tokens, secrets, and authorization. Use for any feature touching login, tokens, payments, user data, webhooks, file uploads, or anything an attacker would love. Modes - design (questions to the user) and audit (questions to the code).
The memory loop. Use when closing significant work or weekly — processes queued lens sessions, mines them for patterns, proposes new lenses / lens updates / CLAUDE.md diffs, and writes approved observations to the foundry ledger. Also accepts an explicit transcript path or session_id as argument.
One-time setup of YOUR lens memory loop on Claude Code — your foundry where the SessionEnd hook queues lens sessions, /lens:retro mines them, and /lens:new grows your collection. Use when the user runs /lens:setup, or when a foundry-dependent skill (retro, new) finds no config. Claude Code only — the loop is not supported on Cowork.
The Lens of the Adversary — red-teams a PLAN before you commit to it. Tries to refute it, names the weakest decision and the unexamined assumption, re-checks the four excavations against the plan. Runs as the MANDATORY final step of /lens:socratic, or standalone (/lens:adversary) on any plan, diff, or design. A meta-lens — it critiques the plan, not a domain.
Scaffold a new lens for this plugin. Use when /lens:retro proposed a lens, or a recurring theme has no lens. Takes a lens name (kebab-case) and a one-line purpose.
The Lens of Test-Driven Development — Socratic battery that ensures tests EARN their existence. Use when writing or planning tests, fixing bugs (regression tests), or reviewing/auditing a test suite. Kills tautological tests, mock-echo tests, implementation mirrors, and testing-for-testing's-sake. Modes - design (tests you're planning) and audit (judges the tests already written).