/culture

Two modes:

1. Internal mode (default). Other workflow skills — and /cheese itself — invoke /culture silently as a thinking pass: restate the question, list assumptions, name candidate options, run a quick shape check, pick the next action. The dialogue does not surface to the user; only the resulting decision (and any code edits the calling skill makes) does. The most common callers are:
   • /cheese step 1 — silent classification reasoning before announce.
   • /cheese tier-2 escalation (see skills/cheese/SKILL.md § Escalation) — fills missing context when the cook-fast-path clarity check fails on the raw input; the synthesis lands in the mini-spec's ## Provenance section.
   • Other workflow skills' own pre-dispatch reasoning passes (mold, cook taste-test, etc.).
2. User-facing mode. The user wants to think, not build: no production code, no spec, no PR. This is culture's sustained domain-modeling mode — investigate as deeply as the question needs, hold it open across turns and sessions rather than forcing convergence, and end by writing a durable /wheypoint so the modeling resumes later. Reach this mode when the user said "no writes" / "rubber-duck this" / "just talk", or routed a thinking-and-modeling task here.

Do not use the user-facing mode when the user wants a written spec (/mold), implementation (/cook), review (/age), or external evidence gathering (/briesearch) — those targets get the internal-mode call instead, and the calling skill does the work.

Invariant

/culture writes no production code and does not commit changes, open PRs, or mutate project state. In user-facing mode it ends every session by writing a durable handoff, delegated to /wheypoint (see ## Handoff slug); that wheypoint is written at session end only, never during the dialogue. The user declares the session over — the agent never declares convergence on the user's behalf; it may ask whether the thread feels settled, and otherwise carries it forward. In internal mode it writes nothing at all. If a user-facing conversation reveals that something should be built, route to /mold or /cook after the wheypoint is written. In internal mode, just return the decision and let the calling skill act.

Flow

Both modes share this reasoning loop; the per-step difference is internal-returns-a-decision vs user-facing-renders-the-dialogue.