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Matt PocockandClaude Opus 5
a0c6bbd635
Rewrite the extinguisher/sprinkler framing as plain prose across the docs page, the changeset and the ask-matt router line. Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5 (1M context) <noreply@anthropic.com>
37 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
37 lines
3.4 KiB
Markdown
## What it does
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`wait-what` is what you type when a message didn't land. You use it the moment you lose the thread, and the agent re-pitches what it just said: a little of the context you were missing, plain English, and the vocabulary from your project's `CONTEXT.md`.
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It is three lines long, and that is the design rather than an unfinished draft. Skills that fight verbosity fail by growing — a four-hundred-line concision skill still leaves the model verbose, because the model reads the volume, not the plea. This one carries a single precise leading word and nothing else.
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## When to reach for it
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You invoke this by typing `/wait-what` — the agent won't reach for it on its own, and it shouldn't: only you know when you stopped following.
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Reach for it the second you notice you're skimming — the agent has drifted into jargon it invented, stacked five acronyms, or explained a decision whose premise you never saw. It's a one-shot corrective on the conversation you're already in. To stop the jargon arriving in the first place, use [grill-with-docs](https://aihero.dev/skills-grill-with-docs) instead, which builds the shared language upfront.
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## The name is the mechanism
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The leading word is **wait**. Not "be concise" — an instruction about the agent's output, which the model satisfies by clipping words and losing you further. **Wait** is about *your* state: it says comprehension failed here. An agent that hears "be brief" writes telegrams. An agent that hears "wait, you lost me" backs up and explains.
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That distinction is the whole skill. Every popular fix for verbosity — `/tldr`, `/no-fluff`, `/talk-normal` — names the *output*, so the model over-corrects into a caveman register that's shorter and no clearer. Naming the *listener* asks for both halves at once: fewer words **and** the context you were missing.
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The re-pitch is deliberately vague about its own scope. It says re-pitch **that**, not "that last message", because what lost you is usually bigger than one paragraph — the agent decides how far back to go.
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## It plugs into the language you already have
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The body reuses the leading words already sitting in your global `CLAUDE.md` and your project's `CONTEXT.md`: ASD-STE100 Simplified Technical English for the register, ubiquitous language for the nouns. Skill, `CLAUDE.md` and `CONTEXT.md` reach for the same tokens, so invoking it isn't a new instruction — it's a reminder of one the agent already agreed to.
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If you have no `CONTEXT.md`, it still works; you just lose the domain-vocabulary half.
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## It's working if
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- The re-pitch is **shorter and clearer**, not shorter and blunter.
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- It adds the premise you were missing rather than just deleting words.
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- Project nouns replace invented ones — the terms in your `CONTEXT.md` come back.
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- You can use it twice in a row without it degrading into terseness.
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## Where it fits
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`wait-what` is a reach-for-it-anytime standalone — it sits inside whatever conversation you're already having, in any skill, at any point. It repairs one message after the fact; [grill-with-docs](https://aihero.dev/skills-grill-with-docs) stops the jargon arriving, because a shared language agreed upfront is the real cure, and [domain-modeling](https://aihero.dev/skills-domain-modeling) is what you reach for when the *words themselves* are the problem rather than one bad message. When you're unsure which skill fits the moment, [ask-matt](https://aihero.dev/skills-ask-matt) routes you.
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