catch-up

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• SKILL.md

SKILL.md (first lines)

# Catch up

Catch the user up on what changed in this chat since the last message they wrote before `/astack:catch-up`, and help them understand each change, not only where it stands. Notifications and subagent results are not their messages. Assume the user remembers their last message and nothing after it.

Use the voice of the **plain-words** skill, not its task: plain words, short sentences, no jargon, like one person catching up another. Say what changed for the user, not how you did it. Say "the numbers match last month's report", not "reconciliation passed with 0 deltas". Leave out hashes, file paths, commands, job IDs, and row counts unless the user needs one to act. Call each PR, notebook, table, or agent by a name the user would know, not by a label you invented. If a fact needs context to make sense, give the context or leave the fact out.

## Gather what changed

Keep this turn read-only. Make visuals only from what you already have: do not change code, re-run a pipeline, start a job, or post anything. Collect your own work since that message, reports from subagents, and messages from anyone else in this chat. Check the current state of each PR, pipeline run, or agent this chat touched. Check each number you will show against the output it comes from, and say so when you correct one.

An action item is a decision or step only the user can take, such as a metric choice, an approval, a publish to a shared dashboard, an irreversible action, or access you lack. Include any still waiting on the user, even one raised before their last message. Work you can still do yourself is not an action item. Never make up a call to fill the reply. A step the user did not ask for and the work does not need is not an action item, unless it is irreversible and waiting on the user: give it one action line, no visual, and skip what happens if the user does not answer.

## Write the reply

Keep the whole reply well under 150 words, not counting visuals. When something is easier to grasp as a picture than as sentences, draw it: how a pipeline or a metric's definition flows, a PR stack or dependency chain with each PR's state, a before and after of a fix, or options side by side. Never draw a status list or boxes with nothing connecting them. Never give a fact twice, in text or across visuals. Leave out work that changed nothing for the user. When words run short, cut from what happened before you cut from the action items.

Open with one sentence that says how many things need the user, or that nothing does. If nothing happened and nothing waits on the user, say so and stop.

Then show what happened, pictures first. Embed inline the charts, screenshots, and videos the work produced, then any diagram that explains a change. Then sum up in one short bullet per thing the user asked for: what came of it, and whether it is done, still running, failed, or not checked. Write each line the way you would say it out loud: "The monthly revenue table now matches the finance report", not "Revenue reconciliation: done". Name any bug found and fixed on the way. Each line must stay true when read alone. Never mark something done that still waits on the user, and leave out anything the action items say. Under the summary, give at most three short lines that change what the user knows or must do. Then name in one line any work left that you can do yourself.

Then list the action items as plain bullets, never as a diagram or box. Give each two lines, or one for an unasked irreversible step: the decision with your recommendation and why, then what happens if the user does not answer. Ask the call the user owns, such as merge, approve, publish, or pick. A step you would take first goes in your recommendation. So does anything that must happen first, and anything that cannot be undone. Write "unknown" for a part you do not know. Link to the detail.

Show a choice after the list. If the visuals above already show its options, write each option's gain and cost under its visual instead of drawing a new one; otherwise, compare the options side by side, with the current state when there is one. Give every option the work weighed, each with what it gets the user and what it costs. Keep them out of the rest of the text.

## Visuals

A visual is a picture: a screenshot, a video, a Mermaid diagram, a chart from the **dataviz** skill, a diagram from the diagram-design skill, or a generated image. A Markdown table is not a visual, even with before and after columns.

Keep each visual small enough to read at a glance: at most six boxes, with at most eight words in each. Write labels as plain words a person would say, not tags like "Tests: pass". A fact that needs a sentence belongs in the text, or nowhere.

Embed screenshots, charts, and videos inline when the change is visible, not only as links. If a visible change has none, mark its summary line "No screenshot yet," and say there what changed on screen. Draw diagrams and charts from facts you have: a Mermaid diagram for how things connect and a chart for numbers. Never invent a number, and never draw or generate a picture of a chart or screen you did not render from real output. Link only artifacts that exist.

From hidenobunagai/astack, MIT.

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