/coauthor-brief — Collaborator Handoff Brief

Produce a single Markdown brief a co-author (or your future self on another machine) can read in a few minutes to know what changed, where each artifact stands, what's blocked, and how to run the pipeline locally — including restricted-data access steps a new collaborator needs. meta-governance.md covers the memory side of cross-machine work (what syncs via git, what stays in gitignored native auto memory); this skill covers the human side: the per-person, per-session handoff.

Core principle: /checkpoint is for you resuming; /coauthor-brief is for someone else starting. The first answers "where am I?"; the second answers "what do I need to know to take over a piece of this?"

When to use

• Before sending a co-author the repo (or a PR / branch) and you want them oriented, not archaeologizing the git log.
• Onboarding a new RA / collaborator who needs the reproduce-locally and restricted-data steps in one place.
• Periodic sync on a long multi-author project — "here's the delta since the last brief."
• Cross-machine handoff — finishing on the office desktop, picking up on the laptop, or handing the analysis half to a co-author who runs Stata while you run R.

When NOT to use

• For your own resume-point — use /checkpoint.
• For distilling a noisy session before auto-compact — use /compress-session.
• For the commit message itself — that goes through /commit.