Use when creating or developing, before writing code or implementation plans - refines rough ideas into fully-formed designs through collaborative questioning, alternative exploration, and incremental validation. Don't use during clear 'mechanical' processes
Use when partner provides a complete implementation plan to execute in controlled batches with review checkpoints - loads plan, reviews critically, executes tasks in batches, reports for review between batches
Use when implementation is complete, all tests pass, and you need to decide how to integrate the work - guides completion of development work by presenting structured options for merge, PR, or cleanup
Automatically creates user-facing changelogs from git commits by analyzing commit history, categorizing changes, and transforming technical commits into clear, customer-friendly release notes. Turns hours of manual changelog writing into minutes of automated generation.
Use after implementation complete to verify all tasks done, update roadmap, run full test suite, and create final report - ensures implementation completeness before finishing development branch
Use when specs/product/ is empty or incomplete to create mission.md, roadmap.md and tech-stack.md through incremental brainstorming and validation.
Use during Phase 2 of spec creation to gather detailed requirements through one-question-at-a-time dialogue - analyzes product context, asks targeted questions, requests visual assets, identifies reusability opportunities, and documents all findings
Use when the user is starting a project or wants to catch up on project progress - scans the specs/ folder, surfaces current status, proposes the next SDD phase, and routes to the appropriate workflow after confirmation.