chalk

What earns a code comment, and what to delete — the default of silence, the moves that dissolve a comment before you write it, the exceptions that earn one, the pinned readers and the test, and where rejected material goes instead. Load early in any session that touches code, before writing or editing any comment, docstring or kdoc, and again when reviewing a diff, where weeding the comments is part of the review.

Create a commit with a contextual body explaining the why, in the chalk voice. Use when the user says "commit this", "commit", "make a commit", "/chalk:commit"; OR is about to compose, draft, write or amend any git commit message body (e.g. "write a commit message", "draft the commit body", "amend the commit message"). Load this skill BEFORE drafting any such prose — it carries the voice guidance the commit body needs.

Explicate an area of the codebase for an engineer catching up on it — how it works now, the decisions that shaped it and their consequences elsewhere, grounded in the code and its recorded history — then answer follow-ups as a depth-first walk, keeping track of where the user has been. Use only when the user runs "/chalk:explicate".

Structure a goal as a tree whose children accomplish their parent rather than argue for it, and test each node for sufficiency. Load whenever writing something with a goal structure in it — the direction or target end state of a piece of work, an issue's Potential approach section, the shape of a problem, or a plan. Covers the sufficiency test, the three kinds of leaf, and the named moves for closing a gap. The chalk:issue skill loads it alongside chalk:voice.

Create a GitHub issue, or update an existing issue's description, with a body that captures the problem and why it matters, in the chalk voice. Use when the user says "open an issue", "file a bug", "raise an issue", "create an issue", "file a ticket", "write up a feature request", "/chalk:issue"; OR is about to compose, draft, write or update any GitHub issue title, issue body or issue description (e.g. "write up an issue for this", "update the issue description", "put the analysis on the ticket"). Load this skill BEFORE drafting any such prose — it carries the voice guidance the body needs.

Pick up an issue's work in this session — read the issue and its neighbourhood, report what the scan found, sort the tracker metadata, and start the plan that journals the session's decisions, questions and constraints as they happen, so its commits and PR are written from them. Use when the user says "pick this up", "pick up

Create a pull request with a description that captures the intent and reasoning behind the change, in the chalk voice. Use when the user says "create a PR", "open a PR", "submit a PR", "raise a PR", "make a PR", "PR this", "/chalk:pr"; OR is about to compose, draft, write or update any pull request title or body (e.g. "write a PR description", "draft the PR body", "update the PR description", "let's put that in the PR"). Load this skill BEFORE drafting any such prose — it carries the voice guidance the PR body needs.

Park the session's work on its issue, so the next session can resume from the issue and its links alone — the description corrected, the metadata sorted, and cards the session discovered raised and linked as appropriate. Use when the user says "put this down", "park this", "/chalk:put-down", or is switching this session away from the issue's work.

Report where the current session has got to as a mindmap — what has landed, what is still open as ID'd ideas, decisions and questions, and a tl;dr. Use when the user says "/sitrep", "where are we", "where were we", "recap the session", "what's still open", or is picking a session back up after a break, a compaction or a handover.

Shared Chalk writing voice — the audience for Chalk artefacts, the specification register, the mindmap structure that two propositions in a relation MUST take, and the layout rules. The chalk:issue, chalk:commit, chalk:pr and chalk:sitrep skills load this before drafting any prose, and the weed-prose agent loads it to review one.