Coldstart is in final cutover and has not been released. The commands in this section run in the development build; there is no release you can install today, so read this as a description of how the product works, not as instructions you can follow tonight.
Coldstart adds six verbs. Four of them carry one unit of work from planning through to a recorded close. Two act on the harness itself and never touch your work at all.
This is the shortest route into the product, which is why it comes first. Everything in the later sections is an explanation of something one of these six verbs does.
[Visual 1 — The complete session ring. A single closed ring drawn clockwise in four labelled arcs of equal size: Plan, Start, Build, Close. Each arc carries the verb that owns it in a smaller typeface beneath the label: /prep, /coldstart, (no verb — this is where the work happens), /done. At the seam between the Close arc and the Plan arc, a small card icon sits on the ring itself, labelled "the pointer", with a short caption: "the only thing that crosses the gap between two sessions". A second, thinner arc label sits inside the ring spanning Start through Build, reading "one session". Outside the ring and deliberately not touching it, a separate box labelled "the harness itself" receives two arrows from the ring's outer edge: /cleanup, tagged "sweep, then propose", and /maintenance, tagged "regenerate and re-measure". Caption under the whole figure: "four verbs on the ring, two off it". Every page in this section is this same ring with one part highlighted, so a reader can locate any verb by its position.]
The four on the ring
| Verb | Where it sits | What it does |
|---|---|---|
/prep | Before the loop | Turns an idea into plan files, and writes no code |
/coldstart | Entering the loop | Reads the pointer, states the scope, then begins work |
/orientate | Beside the loop | The same read with the working half removed |
/done | Leaving the loop | Walks the checks, then records the session and the handoff |
/go is a shorter name for /coldstart. One command, two spellings, one behavior.
The ordering above is not the order in which you meet them. A first session runs the planning verb; every session after that starts with the start verb and ends with the close. The read-only verb sits beside the loop rather than in it, because it deliberately declines to advance anything.
The two off the ring
/cleanup runs the expensive, judgment-heavy sweeps that
would slow down a close if they ran at every one, and reports what it finds rather than fixing it.
/maintenance re-derives the files the product generates
and re-measures the harness against its own recorded history. They share a page because they share
a subject: the harness, not your project.
What the six have in common
One behavior, several doors. Each verb is a thin adapter over a single definition of what that verb does. Typing the slash command, asking for it in ordinary words, or having the harness invoke it directly all reach the same instructions. There is no second, subtly different version behind the natural-language door.
One payload per invocation. A verb reads the instructions for the thing it was asked to do and nothing else. That is a deliberate limit on how much a session loads before it starts, and it is why the six are separate verbs rather than one command with modes.
They read and write files, not memory. Every verb's input is on disk and every verb's output is on disk. That is what makes the loop survive a closed terminal, and it is also the honest boundary: what was never written down is not carried by any of them.
What this section does not cover
These pages describe what each verb does and when to reach for it. They do not explain the ideas the verbs operate on: what a bounded unit of work is, what the project record holds, how guidance reaches a session, or which rules are enforced rather than requested. Those are the later sections, and each one explains a thing you will have already seen a verb touch here.
Next
Start where a session starts: starting a session.
How current this page is
Checked on 10 August 2026 against the product's current command set and its recorded release state. Six verbs is a count of what exists today; a released version may add or rename one. To ask whether a claim here still holds, or to report one that does not, write to [email protected].