lauren
e8d856f027
* docs(pstack): port the September skill audit cuts from the internal tree Port of the 2026-09-01 to 2026-09-07 audit program on the internal skill tree. Deletion-only density cuts and the mannered prose pass applied wherever the OSS sentence is the same sentence. Two new principle leaves, Attack the Premise and Test Behavior Not Implementation, with their index lines. Critique mode removed from how and its callers. PR-body briefing rules in opening-a-pr and technical-writing. Model pins stay on the setup-pstack role mechanism. No internal path, slug, or name added. * docs(pstack): restore the autopilot chooser rule that multi-phase-plan cites multi-phase-plan step 4 picks between autopilot-full and autopilot-stack "per the rule at the end of playbooks/autopilot-stack.md". The density pass removed that paragraph and left the pointer dangling. Restore the paragraph verbatim. The chooser is a rule, not a restatement, and no other file states it. Addresses the Bugbot finding on PR #329. --------- Co-authored-by: Cursor Agent <cursoragent@cursor.com>
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Understand the code before changing it
Editing code you don't understand is how subtle regressions ship. pstack gives you four ways in. /how explains what the code does now. /why digs up the reasons it's shaped that way. /teach blends both into one explanation. /recall rebuilds your own recent context on a topic.
Trace behavior with /how
/how do we dedupe notifications? is there an n+1 when we look up subscribers?
Ask the question you actually have. /how reads the code and answers at the level of a senior engineer onboarding you onto the subsystem, with the runtime flow, the key types, and the non-obvious parts. For a big subsystem it fans out two to four read-only explorers first. For a narrow question it just reads and explains.
Dig up history with /why
/why was the retry limit set to five? does the reason still hold?
/why works like a detective on a cold case. It starts from source control, then queries whatever evidence categories your MCPs expose, such as the issue tracker, long-form docs, team chat, observability, error tracking, and analytics, all in parallel. The report cites everything, separates direct evidence from inference, and says "appears to" when the record is thin. A null result gets reported too, because "nobody wrote down why" is itself an answer.
The two compose naturally. do why first then how is a perfectly good prompt when you suspect the history explains the mess.
Actually understand it with /teach
/teach me how this PR changes retries. convince me it fixes the cause and not the symptom.
/teach is for when a summary isn't enough. It runs /how and /why, for a small change maybe just one of them, and weaves the findings into a plain explanation that builds up diagram by diagram. The "convince me" framing is worth stealing. It turns the explanation into an argument you can poke at instead of a tour.
Rebuild your own context with /recall
/recall catch me up on the export work from last week
/recall mines your own recent chats plus the shared record (issues, prior fixes, errors still firing) and hands back a brief on where things stand and what's next. Use it when you're returning to a topic cold. If you want to resume one specific chat, that's the Session pickup playbook below, not /recall.
Take over prior work with Session pickup
When another agent (or you, last week) left a branch mid-flight:
/poteto-mode take over this branch. read the decision log, figure out what's done, and continue from there. don't redo finished work.
The Session pickup playbook treats the prior trail as authoritative. It reconstructs the branch state and decisions, names the resume point, and verifies inherited claims against the original goal instead of re-deriving everything from scratch.
Pitfall: don't skip this page's skills because "the agent will read the code anyway." An agent that starts editing without a traced model tends to fix the symptom at the first plausible spot. /how first is cheaper than the second bug.
Next: Design the change.