| name | skill-router |
| description | Help users discover available skills and help Claudia pick the right one when a request is ambiguous. Two surfaces: discovery (user says "what can you do?", "/skills", "show me your skills") returns a categorized list; disambiguation (user's request matches 2+ skills) names the candidates and proceeds with the canonical one. Use when user asks about Claudia's capabilities, requests something ambiguous between adjacent skills, or seems unsure which skill they need. |
Skill Router
Two jobs: help the user find the skill they need, and help me (Claudia) pick the right skill when their request straddles two or more.
Why this exists
The shipped catalog has ~42 user-facing skills. Two common failure modes:
- Users don't know what's available. They type "morning brief" because they've seen
/morning-brief somewhere, but they don't know /inbox-check, /pipeline-review, or /what-am-i-missing exist. Friction.
- Ambiguous requests fire the wrong skill. "Summarize this" could be
summarize-doc, capture-meeting, or file-document depending on what comes next. I sometimes pick the wrong one, the user gets the wrong output, both of us waste a turn.
This skill addresses both.
Surface 1: Discovery
When the user says "what can you do?", "/skills", "show me your skills", "list commands", "what skills do you have":
Respond with a categorized list. Keep it scannable:
**📋 Daily flow**
- /morning-brief start-of-day digest
- /inbox-check email triage across configured accounts
- /meeting-prep [person] one-page brief before a call
- /capture-meeting process meeting notes after a call
- /follow-up-draft draft a post-meeting thank-you
**📊 Reviews & reflection**
- /weekly-review end-of-week reflection
- /growth-check monthly or quarterly self-development
- /what-am-i-missing overdue, cooling, blind-spot sweep
**💼 Pipeline & business**
- /pipeline-review active opportunities + stalled items
- /client-health health check across active clients
- /financial-snapshot revenue, expenses, cash position
**📚 Knowledge & memory**
- /memory-audit what I know about an entity
- /memory-health memory system stats
- /wiki write or update a synthesized wiki page
- /map-connections extract relationships across files
- /deep-context full-context analysis for important decisions
**✍️ Drafting**
- /draft-reply general email response
- /summarize-doc executive summary of a document
- /auto-research iterate on a draft until it scores well
**🏗 Setup**
- /new-person create a relationship file
- /new-workspace new project or client workspace
- /file-document save a document with entity links
- /ingest-sources batch-process multiple sources
- /diagnose troubleshoot memory connectivity
Don't list every skill. List the ones a user is most likely to invoke directly. Internal skills (proactive ones like commitment-detector, pattern-recognizer, risk-surfacer) fire on their own and don't need to be in the discovery list.
If the user asks /skills <topic> or "what skills are about ", filter the list to skills whose names or descriptions match, and explain the cluster. Example for /skills meeting:
Three skills for meetings, in order of when they fire:
- /meeting-prep [person] → before the call (one-page brief)
- /capture-meeting → during or after (process notes)
- /follow-up-draft → after (post-meeting email)
Surface 2: Disambiguation
When the user's request matches 2+ skills, name the candidates briefly and proceed with the canonical one. Don't make the user choose; choose for them, and tell them what you chose.
How to detect ambiguity
A request is ambiguous when:
- The trigger phrase appears in 2+ skill descriptions
- The request is in one of the known overlap clusters (see references/overlap-clusters.md)
- The artifact type is ambiguous (a "transcript" could be a meeting transcript →
capture-meeting, or a research interview → ingest-sources, or just a generic document → file-document)
How to disambiguate
Pattern: "Sounds like X or Y. I'll do X. Say so if you wanted Y."
Examples:
User: "Help me draft a follow-up"
Claudia: "Sounds like either draft-reply (general response) or follow-up-draft (post-meeting thank-you with meeting context). Was this from a call we had? If yes, follow-up-draft; if not, draft-reply. Defaulting to follow-up-draft since you said 'follow-up'."
User: "Summarize this meeting"
Claudia: "I'll use capture-meeting (extracts decisions, commitments, blockers from meeting notes). If you wanted a one-shot prose summary without filing as memories, say summarize-doc instead."
User: "What's going on?"
Claudia: "Default for that phrasing is morning-brief. Was that what you wanted, or did you mean /what-am-i-missing (risks and gaps), pipeline-review (deal status), or just an answer about a specific entity? Going with morning-brief."
The pattern: pick the canonical, name the alternative, run.
When NOT to disambiguate
- The request is unambiguous. Don't manufacture options.
- The user has been specific. "Draft a reply to this email" is
draft-reply, no need to mention follow-up-draft.
- The disambiguation explanation would be longer than the actual response. For short tasks, just do the canonical thing and let the user redirect.
Overlap clusters (the canonical map)
See references/overlap-clusters.md for the full map. The clusters I check most often:
| Cluster | Canonical | Adjacent |
|---|
| Outbound messages | draft-reply (general), follow-up-draft (post-meeting) | inbox-check (triage before drafting) |
| Memory views | memory-audit (content), memory-health (system), diagnose (connectivity) | |
| Visualization | brain (3D web), brain-monitor (terminal) | |
| Reflective cadences | morning-brief (daily) → weekly-review (weekly) → growth-check (monthly+) → meditate (session) | |
| Meeting lifecycle | meeting-prep (before) → capture-meeting (during/after) → follow-up-draft (after, outbound) | |
| Risks and gaps | what-am-i-missing (user-invoked) | risk-surfacer (proactive auto-fire) |
| People and relationships | relationship-tracker (ongoing), new-person (create), map-connections (extract graph) | connector-discovery (external services, NOT people) |
| Patterns/judgment/capability | pattern-recognizer (notice) → judgment-awareness (apply rules) → capability-suggester (propose commands) | hire-agent (propose new subagents) |
| Inbound processing | ingest-sources (multi-doc), file-document (single doc), capture-meeting (meeting only), summarize-doc (no filing) | |
Skill index integration
The skill-index.json file at template-v2/.claude/skills/skill-index.json is the structured catalog this skill reads. Each entry has:
name: slugdescription: one-line descriptioncategory: which discovery category the skill falls in (daily, reviews, pipeline, knowledge, drafting, setup, internal)canonical_for: list of request patterns where this skill is the canonical choice (used by disambiguation)see_also: list of adjacent skills (set in PR3's see-also work)
When skill-router is invoked, it loads skill-index.json and uses these fields. The discovery list above is generated from category. Disambiguation uses canonical_for and see_also.
See also
agent-dispatcher for routing tasks to subagents (different concept: this is about which Claudia skill fires; agent-dispatcher is about which subagent gets a task)capability-suggester for proposing new skills when patterns emerge that current skills don't cover
Open questions for future versions
- Telemetry. Logging which skills fire on which inputs would let me learn over time which routings are wrong and propose corrections via
capability-suggester. Not in this version.
- Per-user customization. Some users invoke
weekly-review weekly; others never use it. The discovery list should adapt to the user's actual usage over time. Not in this version.
- Skill search by example. "Show me a skill that does X for Y" → semantic search over skill descriptions. Not in this version; today the user filters by keyword via
/skills <keyword>.
