checkpoint-distill
/checkpoint-distill
Turns the artifacts of finished work into standing guidance a future session inherits. A coding agent is episodic: each session begins without the context of the last one — what was tried, what failed, what stuck, and why. Standing instructions carry that across the gap, but only if something deliberately puts the knowledge there. This skill reads the durable record a unit of work leaves behind, extracts the constraints, failure narratives, and foot-guns worth keeping, ranks them, and — on explicit per-tier approval — writes them into the project's standing instructions as narrative rather than as a list of bare rules.
A bare rule does not survive contact with inconvenience: "do X" tells a future reader what, not why, so the first time the constraint is awkward it gets stripped as arbitrary. The reasoning is the load-bearing part. That is why this skill writes narrative carrying the mechanism, the cost, and the history behind each rule, never a stripped constraint.
Usage:
| Invocation | Scope |
|---|---|
/checkpoint-distill CR-XXXX |
Change Request scoped: analyses that Change Request's durable artifacts. This is the default mode. |
/checkpoint-distill --branch |
Branch scoped: analyses the current branch's commits, delimited by the merge base with the default branch. |
Both scopes name a semantic unit of work. There is deliberately no mode that analyses an arbitrary count of most-recent commits: a commit count is neither a semantically bounded unit nor stable across a merge, so a window of N commits silently changes meaning the moment history is squashed. If a scope is not supplied and cannot be resolved, the skill asks rather than inventing a commit window.
Invocation Contract
The two scopes above are the only two the skill accepts. Everything below constrains how they behave.