umbel: Skill for Claude Code

Narrate: Slots + Code -> Article + Diagrams

Owns: narrative (markdown body, optional) and media (inline SVG / base64 images keyed by id, optional) on any kind — feature, subpage, garden.

How this skill must be invoked

This skill produces narrative content. It must be exercised end-to-end — not bypassed.

• Invoke via the Skill tool (the agent reads this file and follows the workflow) — or via /tend narrate on the command line for human use. When an upstream agent needs many narratives written, it dispatches one subagent per polyglot with this skill loaded; it does not write a python loop that calls tend_update_feature with pre-baked strings.
• No external helper scripts that bake narratives outside the skill. Anything that touches oo-data.narrative must come from a Skill run on that specific polyglot — that's how the quality bar is enforced. Scripts that orchestrate parallel skill runs are fine; scripts that substitute for a skill run are not.
• Reads always go through tend's surfaces — bash <file>.tend.html data | jq for one polyglot, MCP tend_get_context({ id, include_project_context }) for the project index. Don't reinvent oo-data extraction with regex in a node-eval script when the bash verb exists.

Purpose

Tend's main column is the article. The bet (six slots) is the lead. The rail holds graph and schema metadata. The narrative is the body — prose that ties the bet's one-liners into a coherent story, with embedded diagrams where pictures carry the load words can't.

A page with only slots reads like a form. A page with rich narrative reads like a focused essay — the difference between someone scanning your project and someone understanding it.

What this skill assumes

• The feature has slots, checks, and decisions written (output of /tend brainstorm).
• The catalog has personas[].archetype and personas[].jobs[] populated, and opportunities[].personas bound. If empty, redirect to /tend position — without the spine, narrative defaults to declarative voice.
• The feature's checks carry validates_job where personas are bound. The narrative reads those pointers to find which persona-jobs to ground the story in.
• The coverage_files exist on disk and are readable — narrative grounds itself in real code, not abstraction.