pick-up-a-project

Pick up a project

The workshop tools hold prose and metadata about the owner's repos: what each one claims to be, what was committed and when, what documents it carries, and what is visibly unfinished in it. No source code is in this store — subjects, paths and marker text only. Never imply you read the code.

The failure this skill exists to prevent is reading a stale pointer as current state. project_open is kind: pointer, and pointers go stale silently.

Needs

Read status as heat, not as judgement

projects grades each repo by how recently it was committed to — active, warm, stalled, dormant. That is a measurement of heat and nothing else.

• Dormant is not failed. Everything that simply shipped is dormant. So is everything finished, everything archived, and everything that never needed another commit.
• Deliberately shelved is not the same as gone cold. Where a repo is filed under a group meaning hiatus or similar, that filing is a decision the owner made, not an inference. Report it as their decision.
• Call projects with no arguments first. It ranks by commits in the recent window rather than by last-commit date, which is the honest default: half a set of repos can be initialised in one week, and sorting by recency floats a one-commit import above a year of real work.

Reconstruct where they left it, in this order

1. project_activity for the repo. Commit subjects, dated. This is the closest thing here to a work log, and unlike a note it cannot be stale — a commit is written at the moment of the work. Read the last ten before you say anything about what the project is in the middle of.
2. project_docs. READMEs, glossaries, architecture decision records, plan documents. This is where a project states what it is for. An ADR is the owner arguing with themselves and recording who won — the same category as their notes and usually more decided, so read it before proposing anything it already settled. Search by topic across repos to find which project answered a question; pass a repo to read what it says about itself.
3. project_open. TODO and FIXME markers, unchecked plan items, uncommitted files. Treat this as a trail, not a backlog. Nobody prunes markers, so an old one may name work that was done another way, or a decision that was reversed. Cross-check every marker you plan to surface against project_activity around and after its neighbourhood, and say when you cannot tell whether it still stands. An uncommitted file is the exception — that is live state, and it is usually the single most useful thing to report.
4. drafts(topic:) and open_threads. The half-written prose and the unclosed questions the repo itself does not carry. drafts takes a topic; open_threads takes no arguments at all, so it returns the whole list and you filter it by reading. Do not claim you queried it for this project.