drill

name	drill
description	Run the full dark-factory feature pipeline for a prompt — spec, plan, clarify, adversarial assay, ticket creation, and foreman dispatch. Use when the user wants to build a feature end-to-end with derrick. Triggers include "/drill", "derrick drill", "build the X feature", or a natural-language feature description handed to derrick.

Drill — the feature pipeline

/drill <prompt> drives the entire dark-factory pipeline for one feature description: spec → plan → clarify → assay → tickets → foreman dispatch. The slash command is intentionally thin — it just resolves to derrick run drill --prompt "..." — and defers here for the workflow narrative. The user never sees the underlying tools; all output and questions are in derrick's voice.

See DESIGN.md §5.3 for the authoritative flow.

When to use

• The user describes a feature and wants derrick to build it.
• The user types /drill <prompt> or runs derrick drill "<prompt>".
• A halted run needs resuming (see Resume below).

Invocation

derrick drill "build a webhook ingest endpoint with idempotent dedupe"

Or via Claude Code:

/drill build a webhook ingest endpoint with idempotent dedupe

The positional prompt is shorthand; derrick run drill --prompt "..." is the canonical underlying form. add is a hidden, deprecated alias for drill and the runner still accepts the legacy "add-feature" pipeline_id so older run manifests stay resumable (D64).

The eight stages

The pipeline runs eight stages in sequence. Each stage that surfaces output does so in a clean, styled terminal UI. Stages that block on user input wait indefinitely; autonomous stages show a spinner then a summary. Every step logs to .derrick/runs/<utc-ts>/step-<id>.log.

1. Specify — runs speckit specify internally, then shows a clean summary of what derrick understood. Waits for an explicit yes/no; on no, takes a free-text correction and re-runs specify.
2. Plan — runs speckit plan; shows a brief human-readable plan summary. No confirmation here — the assay (stage 5) is the gate.
3. Clarify — runs speckit clarify interactively, streaming questions to the terminal and capturing answers in-session.
4. Apply clarifications — an in-process step that folds the answers into the plan and shows a diff-style summary of the change.
5. Assay — the adversarial review gate. One or more reviewers critique the plan; the pipeline refuses to proceed past an open blocking finding.
6. Summary and confirmation — derrick presents the final plan and asks the user to confirm before any tickets are created.
7. Task and agent generation — decomposes the plan into tickets in a batch on the substrate.
8. Begin work (detachable) — the foreman dispatches tickets to hands. Detachable: the user can leave and re-attach with derrick observe / derrick status.

Failure and resume

Failure of any step halts the pipeline with a numbered error and the exact resume command:

derrick run drill --resume-from <step>

When a prompt is re-run without --resume-from or --force, drill normalises the prompt to a stable key and auto-resumes a matching incomplete run rather than starting fresh (avoids ticket-ID collisions). --force starts a brand-new run and records resume_of: <old_run_id> for lineage.

Skip flags

Stages can be skipped per-run: --no-clarify, --no-assay, --no-github-issues, and the general --skip <step> / --unskip <step>. --dry-run previews every state-mutating step without committing it.

What this skill does NOT do

• Replace derrick init. The repo must be initialised first.
• Add code itself — it orchestrates the host CLIs and the foreman.

Reference

• DESIGN.md §5.3 — derrick drill, the feature pipeline.
• DESIGN.md §5.2 — derrick init (must run first).
• D64 — the add → drill rename and deprecated aliases.
• .claude/commands/drill.md — the thin command that defers here.