spine

align

Use before building any feature or change to interrogate intent until acceptance criteria are crisp. Prevents the agent from building the wrong thing. Writes the agreed intent and criteria to .spine/journal.md.

build

Use to implement a feature or bugfix as small TDD vertical slices that follow the repo's conventions. Produces working, tested code one slice at a time. Reads acceptance criteria and conventions from the Spine.

Web & Frontend Listed

design

Use after align and before build to turn acceptance criteria into a concrete architecture — module boundaries, interfaces, data flow — recorded as ADRs and an architecture map in the Spine. Greenfield-first; also designs features within an existing codebase. Use when starting a new project, making upfront architectural decisions, or designing a non-trivial feature.

init

Use to bootstrap the .spine/ project-memory store in a repo before using the other skills. Detects the stack and seeds context.md, conventions.md, and journal.md. Run once per repo.

remember

Use at the end of a work session to distill what happened back into the .spine/ store so the next session starts informed instead of cold. Updates context and conventions, records decisions as ADRs, and compacts the journal.

ship

Use when verified work is ready to land — turns it into a clean branch, commits, and a pull request whose body is drawn from the Spine (criteria, decisions, evidence). Refuses to ship work that hasn't passed verify. Reads the Spine; writes the shipped status back to it.

troubleshoot

Use when something is broken — a failing test, a bug, an error, behavior that regressed. Drives a disciplined investigate → reproduce → root-cause → fix loop, checks the Spine for prior art, and records the root cause so the failure mode isn't repeated. Iron law — no fix without a confirmed root cause.

verify

Use when work is supposedly complete, before claiming it is done or merging. Checks the change against the acceptance criteria by running tests, typecheck, and review — and reports evidence, never bare assertions. Reads criteria from the Spine.