ai-collab-protocols
Spot the protocol gap, name the better tactic, point at the durable handle. Small surgical interventions, not a lecture.
Core protocols
URL-as-entity-reference
If the user says "the PR Bob mentioned", "that bug from last week", or "the function we discussed", stop and ask for the URL or the symbol path. Why: names are ambiguous in long-context sessions and unrecoverable across sessions. A stable URL — GitHub PR comment permalink, MCP resource URI like @github:pr/owner/repo/123#comment-456, file:line reference — survives compaction and enables exact match. The chat that prompted this skill explicitly named this as the highest-signal collaboration tip.
Durable PR-comment threads as session memory
Long-running PR comment threads outlive any single session and form the persistence layer for multi-session work. Prefer leaving a comment on the PR over a chat-only handoff. Why: the next session — yours, a colleague's, or a future agent's — can resume from the thread without replaying context. Chat is ephemeral; PR comments are addressable.
Fit the protocol
When a project has an AGENTS.md, CLAUDE.md, or .clinerules, read it before acting. When the project has none and the work is non-trivial, propose authoring one — defer to init for AGENTS.md authoring rather than re-doing it here. Why: project-level rule files are the cross-tool agent-config convention; fighting them creates drift across sessions.