visual-recap
Visual Recap
Render a finished change as a single self-contained interactive HTML file that shows a reviewer the shape of the diff before they read the lines: which surfaces moved, which hunks are load-bearing, what's risky — with callouts anchored to the exact lines, then a drop into the literal code. The output is reviewer comprehension as a portable artifact, not a defect list.
This skill exists because Cohen's strongest empirical finding is author preparation: an annotated walkthrough prepared by someone who understands the change correlates with near-zero defect variance. The pipeline produces that annotation as terminal prose (/pre-merge, /walk-commits) but never as a highlightable, shape-first surface — so the reviewer rebuilds the change's topology in their own head before judging any line. /visual-recap produces the missing surface (Meadows: a missing high-bandwidth feedback flow in the review loop) without any lock-in — the agent authors the HTML directly; there is no renderer package, no build system, no server, no MCP connector, and no hosted database. GitHub PR review comments stay the durable channel.
It is the reverse direction of the planning bookend: /visual-recap builds a reviewable artifact from a finished diff, the same data model a forward planning recap would build toward a change.
Invocation Position
This is a side-route skill. It does not block merge and is never auto-invoked.
It reconnects to the main pipeline at the /pre-merge → merge boundary, exactly like /walk-commits: run it when you want shape-first comprehension before approving, then proceed to merge (and /compound if a durable lesson emerged). /pre-merge Phase 4 may recommend it — without invoking it — when the person merging didn't author the diff, the same way it recommends /walk-commits.
Use /visual-recap when:
- A reviewer who did not author the change needs to grasp its shape across multiple files before reading lines.
- The change's topology (what moved where, which hunks are load-bearing) is hard to hold in your head from flat terminal output.
- You want a portable, line-anchored artifact you can open in a browser and feed answers back from.