chase-references

name	chase-references
description	Resolve every reference in the ask before acting — inventory, resolve or search each one, report unfindables explicitly, state the assembled picture back (Q-0273 seed skill).

chase-references

Resolve every reference in a venture-lab ask before acting on it.

Owner-directed (Q-0273, 2026-07-12). Founding incident: the owner opened a session with a comprehensive message containing a direct link to the previous session's brief and multiple sibling repos by name — and the session still oriented on the local repo only, costing ~3 turns of re-discovery. The lesson graduates as an on-demand method (his words: "baked into a method, like a skill, that prevents it from taking up too much storage in the claude.md itself, but is still always loadable on demand"). superbot carries the founding copy; this is the kit's generalized template, inherited by every adopter.

When this runs

At the start of ANY substantive ask — an opening message, an ORDER, a brief — and again whenever a mid-task message introduces new references. Trigger especially on: URLs · file paths · doc titles · repo names · PR/issue numbers · question-router IDs · "as discussed in / the plan says / the brief covers" phrasings.

The method

1. Inventory first. Before any substantive work, list every reference the ask contains or implies (explicit links, named files, named repos, named plans, "the X doc"). The ask's references ARE its context spec — the author included them because reading them is cheaper than re-deriving them.
2. Resolve each one, in this order:
   • a local path → read it;
   • a project doc named fuzzily → find it (glob/grep across the doc roots);
   • a sibling repo or its file → fetch it read-only via the repo's documented reading path / sibling registry, where one exists;
   • a PR/issue number → pull it from the forge (own repo) or from the sibling's committed heartbeat/pointer files;
   • a router question ID → grep docs/question-router.md.
3. An unfound reference is a search task, never a skip. Guess the most-logical homes and look there before proceeding: the planted doc set under docs/ (orientation, current-state, plans, reports) → .sessions/ (recent session records) → docs/ideas/ → the named sibling's committed status and docs, where a sibling registry exists. If it is genuinely absent after that, SAY so explicitly ("the brief references X; I could not find it in A/B/C") — silent omission is how wrong pictures get built.
4. State the assembled picture back (the understand-and-reflect step — pair with the intake skill on owner asks): one short paragraph of what the references collectively establish, before the work starts. A wrong assumption corrected here costs one line; discovered later it costs the session.

The bar

You are done chasing when every reference is either read, fetched, or explicitly reported unfindable with the places you looked. "I'll read it if it becomes relevant" fails the bar for anything the owner linked or named directly — he already decided it was relevant.

Declared capabilities: read-only.