kickoff

Kickoff

Takes a freshly forked brain-starter from empty template to working vault. A preflight check, then six phases, each one independently useful. The user can stop after any phase and still have something better than they started with.

Target: 15 minutes for all six.

Trigger phrases

• /kickoff
• /kickoff <phase> - run one phase only (identity, project, search, integrations, indexes, commit)
• "I just forked brain-starter"
• "set up my brain"
• "help me personalise this vault"

Contract

These are not style preferences. Breaking one makes the skill worse than no skill.

• Every phase is gated. Ask before starting each one. The user may skip any phase, in any order, and skipping is a normal outcome - not a failure.
• Every phase verifies its own work with a tool call. An exit code of 0 is not verification. Read the file back. Run the query. Check that a known note comes out. If you did not observe the result, you may not report the phase as done.
• Never install anything without asking. Detect, report, offer the command. The user runs it, or approves you running it. This is their machine.
• Never invent facts about the user. Everything in CLAUDE.md and knowledge/me.md comes from what they told you in this conversation. An empty section beats a plausible guess.
• Progress is saved after every phase to .claude/kickoff-state.json, so an interrupted run resumes instead of restarting.
• Re-running is safe. Completed phases report as already done and are skipped unless the user asks to redo one. Never overwrite the user's own edits to a file a previous phase created - read it first, and extend rather than replace.

State file

.claude/kickoff-state.json. Create it on first run. Write it after every phase.

{
  "version": 1,
  "started": "YYYY-MM-DD",
  "phases": {
    "preflight":    { "status": "done",    "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "identity":     { "status": "done",    "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "project":      { "status": "skipped", "at": "YYYY-MM-DD" },
    "search":       { "status": "failed",  "at": "YYYY-MM-DD", "note": "qmd not installed" },
    "integrations": { "status": "pending" },
    "indexes":      { "status": "pending" },
    "commit":       { "status": "pending" }
  }
}