cctop

Use when designing, scripting, or storyboarding a short demo, launch, explainer, or marketing video (especially for a developer tool, app, or SaaS), OR when auditing, critiquing, or improving an existing video's narrative, hook, pacing, or storyboard. Runs a verified 6-stage process — positioning, message spine, beat sheet, script, storyboard, review — embedding StoryBrand, Before-After-Bridge / PAS / AIDA, the Pixar Story Spine, and the But/Therefore rule. Invoke whenever the work is about the STORY of a video rather than its rendering, including phrasings like "storyboard this", "what's the hook", "make the video more compelling", "the video falls flat", "script a launch video", or "audit this video". After an approved render, hand off publishing to video-assets so MP4 and AVIF release assets stay in sync. Do not use this skill for the encoding/rendering pipeline itself.

Restart cctop for local development and testing. Use when the user asks to restart, relaunch, run, or prepare the cctop app locally; ensures the current cctop-hook is installed before the menubar app is relaunched and verified.

Use when publishing, replacing, auditing, or linking cctop promo/demo video assets through GitHub Releases, especially the non-latest media-assets release. Trigger for requests like "upload the launch video", "add another video asset", "replace the README demo video", "where should this video live", "update media-assets", or "generate the README AVIF preview". Covers stable asset names, release selection, AVIF preview generation, README/site links, and avoiding v* product-release tags. Do not use for video narrative/storyboard work; use video-storyboard for that.

Use when cutting a cctop release - "cut a release", "release vX.Y.Z", "bump the version and tag", "ship a new version". Drives version bump, CI, tag push, release pipeline monitoring, and verification, with hard approval gates before anything becomes public.

Use when debugging SwiftUI issues in this macOS app — views not updating, layout problems, unnecessary re-renders, state ownership bugs, Preview crashes, or NSHostingView/NSPanel quirks. Covers both general SwiftUI debugging and macOS-specific patterns.

Use when cctop-hook command fails or is not found. Guides user to install the cctop menubar app.

Use when smoke-testing cctop end to end — verifying a real coding-agent session is tracked and shows in the panel. Trigger on "smoke test sessions", "verify session tracking", "test the hook pipeline", "check cctop picks up a claude/codex/opencode/pi session", or "run the e2e test", even without the word "skill". Creates a real CLI agent session in a terminal, confirms cctop tracks it, opens the panel programmatically, and captures screenshot proof.