/culture

Two modes:

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.).
User-facing mode. The user has explicitly opted out of writes for this session. Conversation is the deliverable; no code, no spec, no PR. Reach this mode only when the user said "no writes" / "rubber-duck this" / "just talk" or equivalent.

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 does not write production code, commit changes, open PRs, or mutate project state. The only sanctioned artifact is the opt-in notes handoff at .cheese/notes/<slug>.md (see ## Handoff slug below), written only at session end of a user-facing session and only when the user asks for notes — never during dialogue, never in internal mode. If a user-facing conversation reveals that something should be built, route to /mold or /cook and stop. In internal mode, just return the decision and let the calling skill act.

Flow

Both modes share the same reasoning loop. The difference is what the agent does with the output: internal mode returns a single decision back to the calling skill; user-facing mode renders the dialogue and waits for the user.