feat: add wait-what, the verbosity fire extinguisher

A three-line, user-invoked skill in in-progress/. Fire it when the
agent's last message doesn't land; it re-pitches that message with
the missing context, in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English,
using the ubiquitous language from CONTEXT.md.

The name is the mechanism. Concision skills fail by growing, so this
one is a single precise leading word and nothing else.

Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
This commit is contained in:
Matt Pocock
2026-08-05 10:57:02 +01:00
co-authored by Claude Opus 5
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commit 355fa7420b
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---
"mattpocock-skills": minor
---
Add **`wait-what`** to `in-progress/` — a fire extinguisher for model verbosity. Fire it the moment a message doesn't land, and the agent re-pitches *that message*: a little context, ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, and the ubiquitous language from your `CONTEXT.md`. User-invoked, three lines long.
The mechanism is the name. Concision skills fail by growing — a 400-line skill still leaves the model verbose — so this one is a single precise leading word and nothing else. It also reuses the leading words already in your global `CLAUDE.md`, so the skill, `CLAUDE.md` and every `CONTEXT.md` reach for the same tokens.
It's the extinguisher, not the sprinkler. The cure for jargon is a shared language built upfront with `/grill-with-docs`; this is the in-the-moment corrective for when you don't have one yet.
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- **[writing-fragments](./writing-fragments/SKILL.md)** — Grilling session that mines you for fragments — heterogeneous nuggets of writing — and appends them to a single document as raw material for a future article.
- **[writing-shape](./writing-shape/SKILL.md)** — Take a markdown file of raw material and shape it into an article paragraph by paragraph, arguing format choices at each step.
- **[claude-handoff](./claude-handoff/SKILL.md)** — Hand the current conversation off to a fresh background agent that picks up the work immediately, seeded with a handoff summary via `claude --bg`. User-invoked.
- **[wait-what](./wait-what/SKILL.md)** — Fire this when the agent's last message did not land. It re-pitches that message with the context you're missing, in plain English, using your `CONTEXT.md` vocabulary. User-invoked.
- **[setup-ts-deep-modules](./setup-ts-deep-modules/SKILL.md)** — Wire dependency-cruiser into a TypeScript repo so each package is a deep module — implementation hidden in subfolders, reachable only through its entry-point files, tests exercising it through those. User-invoked.
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---
name: wait-what
description: Stop. That last message did not land — re-pitch it.
disable-model-invocation: true
---
Wait — I don't understand where you've got to here. Re-pitch that last message: give me a little bit of context, talk in ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English, and use the ubiquitous language from `CONTEXT.md`.
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interface:
display_name: "Wait What"
short_description: "Re-pitch that last message — simpler, with the context I'm missing"
policy:
allow_implicit_invocation: false