Using Tribal

When to use this skill

Use using-tribal when Tribal is installed and wired, and the user wants to capture knowledge, query it, traverse the graph, or diagnose an issue.

Use installing-tribal instead when Tribal is not yet installed, is being reinstalled, transports are being switched, or the harness's MCP config needs (re-)wiring.

If both apply (the user just finished bootstrap and immediately wants to ingest), installing-tribal runs first and hands off to this skill at the end.

What Tribal is for

Tribal stores tacit, semantic, and procedural knowledge: the why, the ways of working, and the breakthroughs that surface during real engineering work. The kind of context that walks out the door when a teammate leaves: the design philosophy a team holds at a point in time, the heuristic someone keeps returning to, the moment a debugger realises a whole class of bugs share a symptom.

Tribal is not a graph-RAG over a codebase, not a vanilla memory store, not a journalling tool, and not a place for line numbers or function signatures. Candidate ingests that fit one of those frames more naturally tend to be weak, but the user is the gate. Enrich the prose and submit; the ingestion pipeline performs its own tacit extraction downstream.

How ingests are phrased (summary)

Every ingest follows a four-component pattern: principle, trigger nod, symptom space, applicability frame. The principle does the work: a portable claim that reads true to a stranger six months later, without the original incident in mind. Each ingest carries one principle, not a bundle.