umbel: Skill for Claude Code

Tend: Next-Action Router

Entry point for all tend-* skills. The primary move is route the user to their highest-leverage next step — computed deterministically by tend next from on-disk project state, with reasons drawn from the canonical reason-code vocabulary (src/core/reason-codes.ts). Status overviews and graph rendering are secondary.

What this skill assumes

• The project has been initialized with tend init (garden polyglot at docs/tend/overview.html exists).
• MCP tools are available — preferred path is mcp__tend__tend_get_next. CLI fallback is node dist/bin/tend.js next --json when MCP is not wired.
• The user wants a routing recommendation, a status read, or to be handed off to a sub-skill.
• Nothing is assumed about the project's spine state — if it's empty, the next-action engine returns a bootstrap action with reason code unbound_persona and this skill surfaces that as-is.

Trigger

• "what should I do?" / "what's next?" / "what should I work on?" / "next action"
• User mentions features, requirements, or planning
• "show status", "what's the progress?"
• "visualize", "show graph", "show dependencies"
• Any /tend command without a more specific verb

Workflow

1. Compute the next action

Call the next-action engine. MCP path is preferred because it runs in-process and respects the same code the CLI does:

mcp__tend__tend_get_next       (preferred)

Fallback when MCP is not available:

node dist/bin/tend.js next --json

Both return the same NextAction shape:

{
  "action": "/tend audit checkout",
  "feature_id": "checkout",
  "reason_codes": ["stale_evidence"],
  "explanation": "Feature \"checkout\": An audit verdict cites a file whose SHA has changed since the verdict was recorded… Run `/tend audit checkout`.",
  "not_chosen": [
    { "feature_id": "user-login", "reason_codes": ["stale_evidence"], "explanation": "…" },
    { "feature_id": "search-filters", "reason_codes": ["blocked"], "explanation": "…" }
  ]
}