/chat

The orient-and-working-mode command. Use it to land in a project, get your bearings, navigate the vault, and handle small ad-hoc tasks that do not warrant a plan file.

Why

/chat is the entry point you reach for when you sit down at a project and want to know where things stand — what is in flight, what is parked, what just shipped — before deciding whether to run anything heavier. It is also the right tool for small one-off work: reading a plan, tweaking a frontmatter field, writing a quick note under notes/, answering a question about the codebase. Anything that does not produce a durable plan artefact lives here.

It is the only skill with an "orient" responsibility. The other skills assume you already know which plan you are working on; /chat is where that picture comes from.

Command

/chat
/chat we're continuing to wrap up the develop skill refactor — i'll give you ad-hoc tasks
/chat plans/20260423-refactor-develop-skill-to-groom-pattern.md address the issues from the previous implementation

Bare /chat orients against the current project. The free-text body is read verbatim — mention a plan path, a retro path, a question, or a small change request and the skill picks it up.

The free-text body is read verbatim. Anything you mention — a plan path, a retro path, a question about a lesson, a small change request — is picked up.

What it is for

  • Orient. Land in a project and see what is in flight, what is parked, and what is queued.
  • Navigate the vault. Open plans, retros, lessons, and notes; cross-reference them; surface the relevant slice of ~/Claude/{project}/ for whatever you are about to do.
  • Light edits. Frontmatter tweaks, manual status flips, small notes under notes/, single-line corrections to a plan that does not need re-grooming.
  • Ad-hoc small tasks. Questions about the codebase, quick reads, one-off greps. The kind of work where opening a plan file would be heavier than the work itself.

See Vault for the layout /chat navigates over.

Escalation

/chat is bounded by what fits inside a single session without producing a durable artefact. When the conversation outgrows that boundary, escalate rather than stretch the skill:

  • Scope grows into real work → /groom <topic>. Anything that needs research, milestones, story-point estimates, or a plan file belongs in /groom. The rule of thumb: if you would want a retro on it later, it is /groom material now.
  • A ready-for-dev plan is waiting → /develop <plan-path>. /chat will route you there rather than trying to implement milestones inline.
  • A plan just finished → /retro <plan-path> to capture findings; /learn afterwards.

The hand-off is explicit: /chat recommends the next command and stops, rather than reproducing another skill's workflow inline. See /groom, /develop, /retro, and /learn for what each of those commands owns.