kiln

Use when starting any creative work — a feature, a component, new functionality, a change in behaviour — before implementation. Explores intent and design, and classifies how much ceremony the work needs.

Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing a fix. Find the root cause first; a symptom fix is a failure.

Use when the user asks to build, catch up or inspect the project's DNA — the evidence-linked business map of the codebase (/kiln dna init, /kiln dna update) — and whenever a batch has to go into .kiln/dna/store/. Drives the bootstrap and update playbooks through kiln dna's gated commands, fanning scans out to subagents.

Use when the plan gate is approved and the plan is ready to work task by task. Implements every task in this session under TDD, recording each step's exit code as it goes.

Use when the user runs /kiln:kiln with a sentence, a ticket reference, or a URL, and for every stage of that work until a pull request exists. Drives investigate, plan, implement, review, verify and ship, renders every gate, and is the only component that creates todos.

Use when implementation is finished and the change needs judging before it ships. Reviews the whole diff against the plan, grades findings by severity and likelihood, and reconciles what the plan predicted against what was touched.

Use when implementing any feature or bugfix, before writing implementation code. Write the test first, watch it fail, then write the minimal code that makes it pass.

Use when a spec or a brief describes a multi-step task and the plan gate has not been given yet, before touching code. Writes the plan the gate approves.