Scratchpad

A fast-capture inbox for the things that surface while you're doing something else: an out-of-scope bug you noticed, an idea you don't want to act on now, a fact about the system you just learned the hard way, a question you can't answer yet. These would normally evaporate when the conversation ends. This skill parks them in a plain-markdown file in the repo so they can be found, finished, or graduated to a permanent home later.

The whole point is to be lightweight enough that capturing never derails the real work, and structured enough that lookup later actually works.

What this is not

Be deliberate about where things land — the user runs three different systems and they don't overlap:

• Scratchpad (this skill) — transient, project-local, gitignored. The current repo's parking lot. Lost-if-not-captured working notes.
• Memory — durable facts you want loaded into context every session. A scratchpad discovery that proves permanently true graduates to memory; it doesn't start there.
• PARA / second brain — personal knowledge-vault organization. A scratchpad task that's real, tracked work graduates to a PARA project or a GitHub issue.

The scratchpad sits upstream of memory and PARA. When something outgrows the parking lot, promote it (see Promote). Don't capture into the scratchpad things that already belong in those systems.

The store