Use when driving software from concrete agreed examples of behaviour — running three-amigos discovery and example mapping before coding, formulating Given-When-Then scenarios in feature files, and treating them as living documentation that tests the team their shared understanding. ATDD and BDD are one practice here. Triggers on BDD, ATDD, Gherkin, Given-When-Then, Cucumber, feature file, scenario / scenario outline, three amigos, example mapping, specification by example, living documentation, acceptance-test-driven — even when the user doesn't say 'BDD'.
Use when writing, structuring, or labelling code-review feedback on a pull or merge request — Conventional Comments labels (praise / nitpick / suggestion / issue / question / thought / chore / todo), the blocking vs non-blocking vs if-minor decorations, pairing one top-level summary with line-anchored inline comments, cross-linking the summary to its details instead of "see comment 3", and verifying each claim against an authoritative source before asserting it. Platform-independent review craft. Triggers on PR / MR review, leaving review comments, blocking / non-blocking, nit, severity, request-changes vs approve, or a review summary — even when the user doesn't say "code review".
Use when running git operations or resolving repo-state issues. Triggers on prompts about commit messages, conventional commits (feat/fix/chore/docs), merge conflicts, rebases, worktrees, feature-worktree create / merge / abandon / cleanup, branch cleanup, or history rewrites, even when the user doesn't say 'git'.
Use when scoping, researching, deciding, planning, revising, critiquing, continuing, updating, or validating a feature, refactor, or analysis task — covers the whole plan-document lifecycle plus codebase research (alignment, hardening, simplification, template extraction, TODO scanning, shared-library design). Triggers on prompts about planning, designing, scoping, breaking down, architecting, settling or interrogating requirements and decisions, stress-testing / critiquing a plan, code analysis / cleanup / hardening / alignment, even when the user doesn't say 'plan'.
Use when authoring a pull or merge request - writing the description, sizing and splitting the change, documenting how it was tested, surfacing tradeoffs, and getting it review-ready before assigning reviewers. Triggers on opening a PR/MR, PR descriptions or templates, large or atomic PRs, what to put in a PR, draft vs ready, stacked PRs, or self-review, even when the user doesn't say 'pull request'.
Use when writing, evaluating, splitting, or refining user stories — applying INVEST, the 3 Cs (Card / Conversation / Confirmation), the 'As a / I want / so that' template, writing acceptance criteria, slicing vertically into a walking skeleton, splitting with SPIDR or the splitting-pattern flowchart, and refining the backlog into ready items. Triggers on user story, INVEST, story splitting, SPIDR, vertical slice, walking skeleton, acceptance criteria, 'As a... I want... so that...', 3 Cs, backlog refinement / grooming, SMART tasks — even when the user doesn't say 'user story'. Skip Given-When-Then and executable specs (bdd-guide), test design and levels (testing-guide), domain modelling (ddd-guide), the FDD feature list (fdd-guide), and the coupling theory behind 'Independent' (connascence-guide).
Use when authoring, reviewing, merging, simplifying, or distilling reusable user-invocable prompt files (a.k.a. slash commands — files an agent harness exposes as `/command` invocations). Triggers on edits to prompt / command files, on prompts to make a slash command, save a workflow as a reusable command, merge across commands, condense a verbose command, or distill a fat command into a thin command that delegates to a skill — even when the user doesn't say 'prompt' or 'slash command'.
Use when running Feature-Driven Development's process scaffolding — the five processes (Develop an Overall Model, Build a Features List, Plan by Feature, Design by Feature, Build by Feature), naming features with the action-result-object template, decomposing into feature sets and major feature sets, tracking the six weighted build milestones, and organising Chief Architect / Chief Programmer / Class Owner roles and per-feature-set teams. Triggers on FDD, feature-driven development, feature list, design by feature, build by feature, feature-naming template, milestone percent-complete, class owner, chief programmer — even when the user doesn't say 'FDD'.