Session Hygiene

Without /startwork, your AI tool starts cold — no company context, no policies, no knowledge of your prior work. With it, the session loads everything: company policies (including hard-enforcement rules), available workers and skills, active projects with incomplete stories, and your last session's handoff state.

The slug you pass determines what context loads. Use a company name for broad work, a project name to pick up where you left off, a repo name for focused coding, or describe a task in plain English and HQ classifies it and proposes a worker pipeline.

/handoff is how HQ gets smarter. The foreground pass is minimal — it commits pending changes, writes a thread file capturing everything about this session (what you did, what's next, what you learned), and saves a small handoff pointer. Index regeneration, learning capture, document updates, and search reindexing all run as background follow-ups.

The next session reads handoff.json (a small pointer file) and picks up exactly where you left off. No context lost. No re-explaining. No "where was I?"

On a long session, run /checkpoint mid-session to save state without ending — the in-flight counterpart to /startwork…/handoff.

Each /startwork → work → /handoff cycle makes HQ smarter. Learnings accumulate as policies. Knowledge indexes grow richer. Thread history gives every future session a map of your team's decisions, mistakes, and patterns. After a few weeks, your AI tools know your codebase, your conventions, and your team's preferences — not because they were trained on it, but because you built the context.