Skills Reference
Skills are slash commands invoked inside Claude Code. All 42 skills are embedded in the CQ binary (skills_embed build tag) — no internet required after install.
Ideation
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/pi | play idea, ideation, brainstorm | Brainstorm and refine ideas before planning. Diverge/converge/research/debate modes. Writes idea.md and auto-launches /plan. |
Core Workflow
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/plan | plan, planning, design, blueprint | Discovery → Design → Lighthouse contracts → Task creation. Full structured plan for a feature. |
/run | run, execute, go | Spawn workers for all pending tasks in parallel. Continuous mode — auto-respawns until queue empty. |
/finish | finish, complete, wrap up | Build → test → docs → commit. Post-implementation completion routine. |
/status | status, progress | Visual task graph with progress, dependency graph, queue summary, and worker status. |
/quick | quick, fast | Create + assign one task immediately, skip planning. For small focused changes. |
Quality Loop
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/polish | polish | (Deprecated — polish loop is now built into /finish. No separate invocation needed.) |
/refine | refine | (Deprecated — quality loop is now built into /finish. No separate invocation needed.) |
/checkpoint | (auto at checkpoint) | Phase gate: 4-lens review (holistic / user-flow / cascade / ship-ready). Approve, request changes, replan, or redesign. |
/validate | validate, check | Run lint + tests with severity-based handling. CRITICAL blocks commit, HIGH requires review, MEDIUM is recommended. |
/review | review | Comprehensive 3-pass code or paper review with 6-axis evaluation. Generates formal review document. |
/company-review | company review, code review, diff review | PI Lab standard code review. PR/MR diff-based 6-axis evaluation. |
/submit | submit, send | Submit completed task with automated validation. Verifies commit SHA, triggers checkpoint if needed. |
/simplify | simplify, clean up | Review changed code for reuse, quality, and efficiency, then fix any issues found. |
Task Management
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/add-task | add task, new task | Add task interactively with DoD, scope, and domain guidance. Infers ID from existing patterns. |
/stop | stop, halt | Stop execution, transition to HALTED state. Preserves progress for later resumption. |
/swarm | swarm | Spawn coordinator-led agent team. Modes: standard (implementation), review (read-only audit), investigate (hypothesis competition). |
Session
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/done | done, session end, session done | Mark the current session as done with full capture — summarize work, save knowledge, clean up state. |
/attach | session name, attach, name this session | Attach a name to the current session for later resume with cq claude -t <name>. Optionally add a memo. |
/reboot | reboot, restart | Reboot the current named session. cq resumes with the same session UUID automatically. |
/session-distill | session distill, session summary, distill | Distill the current session into persistent knowledge. Extracts decisions, patterns, and insights into the knowledge base. |
Research & Documents
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/c9-init | c9-init, c9 initialize | Initialize a new C9 research project. Creates state.yaml with metric, convergence conditions, and Hub URL. |
/c9-loop | c9-loop | Main loop driver — reads current phase from state.yaml and auto-executes next step. |
/c9-survey | c9-survey | Survey latest arXiv papers + SOTA benchmarks using Gemini Google Search grounding. |
/c9-conference | c9-conference | Claude (Opus) + Gemini (Pro) debate mode — research conference simulation. |
/c9-steer | c9-steer | Change phase and update reason without editing state.yaml directly. |
/c9-report | c9-report | Collect experiment results from remote server via distributed worker. |
/c9-finish | c9-finish | Save best model + document results when research loop completes. |
/c9-deploy | c9-deploy | Deploy best model to edge server. Can run independently of /c9-finish. |
/research-loop | research loop | Paper-experiment improvement loop. Iterates review → plan → experiment → re-review until target quality reached. |
/experiment-workflow | experiment workflow, experiment lifecycle | End-to-end experiment lifecycle management: data prep → train → eval → record. |
/c2-paper-review | paper review, academic review | (Deprecated — use /review instead.) |
Development
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/tdd-cycle | TDD, test-driven, RED-GREEN-REFACTOR | TDD cycle guide. RED-GREEN-REFACTOR sequence for test-driven development. |
/debugging | debug, debugging, bug tracking | Systematic debugging. Reproduce → hypothesis → isolate → fix → verify sequence. |
/spec-first | spec-first, spec first, design doc | Spec-First development guide. Write spec doc before code. |
/incident-response | incident, outage, server down, error rate surge | Production incident response workflow. Triage → diagnose → mitigate → postmortem. |
Meta & Utilities
| Skill | Triggers | Description |
|---|---|---|
/craft | craft, create skill, create rule | Interactively create skills, agents, rules, and CLAUDE.md customizations. |
/help | help | Quick reference for skills, agents, and MCP tools. Decision tree + keyword search across all 42 skills. |
/clear | clear | Reset C4 state for debugging. Clears tasks, events, locks in .c4/ with optional config preservation. |
/init | init, initialize | Initialize C4 in current project. Detects installation path, runs cq claude/cursor/codex. |
/claude-md-improver | improve CLAUDE.md, claude-md, improve instructions | Analyze and improve the project's CLAUDE.md. Structure check, build/test commands, agent rules. |
/skill-tester | skill tester, skill eval, eval | Test and evaluate skill quality. Generate eval cases, run classification trials, score trigger accuracy. |
/pr-review | create PR, PR checklist, pull request | PR/MR creation checklist and review guide. Auto-validates before merge. |
/release | release | Generate CHANGELOG from git history. Conventional Commits analysis, semantic version suggestion, tag creation. |
/standby | standby, wait, worker mode | Convert session into persistent distributed worker via Supabase. Waits for jobs, executes, reports back. full tier only |
/interview | interview | Deep exploratory requirements interview. Acts as senior PM/architect to discover hidden requirements and edge cases. |
Skill Health
Requires
connectedorfulltier (LLM Gateway needed for haiku classification).
Measure and monitor whether skills trigger correctly — ensuring Claude classifies user prompts accurately before and after changes.
| MCP Tool | Description |
|---|---|
c4_skill_eval_run | Run k-trial haiku classification on a skill's EVAL.md test cases. Returns trigger_accuracy. |
c4_skill_eval_generate | Generate EVAL.md test cases (positive + negative prompts) for a skill using haiku. |
c4_skill_eval_status | Show trigger accuracy summary for all evaluated skills. ok = ≥ 0.90. |
cq doctor includes a skill-health check that warns when any skill drops below the 0.90 threshold.
Machine-readable
Download as JSONL for programmatic use:
sh
curl https://playidea-lab.github.io/cq/api/skills.jsonl