Pre-computed context

Current branch: !git branch --show-current 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown" Working tree status: !git status --porcelain 2>/dev/null | head -20 || echo "clean" Project root: !git rev-parse --show-toplevel 2>/dev/null || echo "unknown"

These values orient this session only. The project root is an absolute machine path — use it to resolve files while working, but never echo it into EXPLORE.md; the handoff artifact records relative paths (see the outcome gate below).

Routing — dispatch by default

From the main conversation, this skill dispatches the discovery:explorer subagent. Exploration reads many files; keeping that out of the orchestrator's context window is the point. The agent loads the project's path-scoped rules, runs the six dimensions, writes the artifact set, and returns a bounded summary plus a file pointer — not the reads. The parent resolves the pre-dispatch envelope first (scope, memory-slice path, memory root, budget, capability flags) and owns the post-dispatch boundary after: re-surfacing open_questions to the user, dispatching the sibling verifier, and writing its verdict back into EXPLORE.md — the explorer always returns verification: pending because it may not grade its own work, so an artifact left saying pending after the parent verified it cannot be told apart from one whose verifier never ran, and this artifact is the whole handoff a fresh session resumes from.

Run inline instead when any of these holds — inline runs the identical workflow, and the escape hatch relaxes nothing:

Tight turn-by-turn iteration — ≤~5 known files, findings feeding a same-session edit, and you will redirect as results land.
Cost — a dispatched run pays the full six dimensions every time; a single-file question does not need an envelope.
The invoking context is already a subagent — dispatch-by-default is scoped to the main-conversation boundary. Hoisting, not nesting: the outer dispatch already supplied the fresh context, so a second hop only spends the inner agent's own window.

One named alternative: the built-in Explore subagent, for raw "where is X / how does Y work" search. Fast, read-only, context-isolated. It skips project memory (convention-blind) and neither runs this 6-dimension workflow nor writes EXPLORE.md — pass key constraints in the prompt when conventions matter, and expect to write the artifact yourself. Scale 1→N by dispatching more, each owning a disjoint area.