refine

/swarm:refine

Recursive refinement on an existing branch and pull request. Skips Research/Converge/Approve/Execute — the team enters at Review, then Refine, then Deliver.

Pass outcomes inline (/swarm:refine <outcomes>) or run without arguments to be prompted.

Read ${CLAUDE_PLUGIN_ROOT}/commands/launch.md for Step 0 (pre-flight), Step 1 (invoke swarm:workflow-rules — the governance spec), Steps 8a–8e (team creation, member spawning, pulse setup), and the Universal rules that apply across all modes in Step 8f — especially the governance spec's Live-team gate prompts rule (the AFK-timeout / durable plain-text-restatement recovery), which governs this command's decision gates (Finish, ship-approval) too. This command replaces Steps 2–7 and overrides Step 8f's phase arc — not those universal rules.

No lead research unless enabled. The pre-flight reads below are housekeeping, not research — they run unconditionally (analogous to launch.md's ship-definition detection). All other research is delegated to teammates.

Settings

• Mode: Code
• Outcomes question: "What outcomes was this branch/PR supposed to achieve? (Describe what was meant to be working differently or better — the team will refine the work against these outcomes.)"
• Cost tier: Ultra
• Lead research: No
• Roster (fixed): Principal Engineer (facilitator), Correctness Reviewer, Outcomes Reviewer, Regression Reviewer

User-Provided Context

$ARGUMENTS

Workflow

1. Pre-flight reads. Run via Bash, capture each output as a raw string. Use the exact abort messages below — they are the user's only signal that something is wrong, so consistency matters across invocations.

   • git rev-parse --is-inside-work-tree — if not in a git repo, abort with: Not in a git repository. /swarm:refine works on a branch and pull request.
   • git branch --show-current — capture. If empty (detached HEAD), abort with: Cannot run /swarm:refine in detached HEAD state. Run "git checkout <branch-name>" to switch to a branch first. If equal to the repo's default branch (resolved via git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD --short 2>/dev/null then stripping origin/), abort with: Cannot refine the default branch directly. Switch to a feature branch.
   • gh pr view --json title,body,baseRefName,url 2>/dev/null — capture PR data if present. Extract baseRefName for the diff base. If no PR exists, fall back to the repo's default branch resolved earlier via git symbolic-ref refs/remotes/origin/HEAD --short 2>/dev/null (stripped of origin/) — master, develop, or whatever the repo actually uses. Do not hardcode main. If git symbolic-ref itself returns nothing (no origin/HEAD set), abort with: Cannot determine the default branch — origin/HEAD is not set. Run "git remote set-head origin -a" or open a PR with the correct base before re-running /swarm:refine. Surface the fallback (whichever branch was resolved) explicitly in the Step 7 confirmation summary so the user can correct the base before launch.
   • git diff <base>...HEAD — capture. If empty (HEAD == base), abort with: No changes detected between <branch> and <base>. Nothing to refine. If this is unexpected, verify the diff base is correct. (substitute the actual branch and base names).
   • git diff --stat <base>...HEAD | tail -1 — capture the one-line diff stat (e.g., 12 files changed, 340 insertions(+), 45 deletions(-)) for the Step 3 confirmation summary. If the diff is empty this is moot — the empty-diff abort above fires first.