Coldstart is in final cutover and has not been released. The commands on this page run in the development build; there is no release you can install today.
/orientate prints where you left off and what this project's harness actually contains, and then
stops. It is the same front door as the start verb with the working half removed. It writes nothing
at all, not even the field that records what kind of session this is.
[Visual 1.2 — The same session ring as 1.1, with a read-only overlay. The four arcs (Plan, Start, Build, Close) are all drawn in thin grey outline with none of them lit. A translucent pane lies flat across the whole ring, tinted and labelled "read-only". Two thin sight-lines run from an eye icon outside the ring to the pointer card at the Close-to-Start seam and to a small stack labelled "what is installed"; both lines are drawn as dashed arrows pointing inward only, with a caption under the diagram reading "arrows point in, never out: nothing on this page writes". A small crossed-out pen icon sits on the ring's Build arc.]
The problem it solves
The instinct when returning to a project is to ask a question: what was I doing here? The risk is that asking produces an answer and then, without a decision anywhere in between, produces work.
That is a real failure mode, not a hypothetical one. An agent that has just read the plan card is one sentence away from executing it. If your intent was to glance at the project over coffee and decide later whether to spend the evening on it, a helpful agent has just spent the evening for you. Worse, it did so having declared the session a build session, which changes how other parts of the product treat everything that follows.
Separating the looking from the working is the fix. The two verbs share a front door and split at the point where reading becomes doing.
What it does
It prints the pointer. The active section, the session mode, the next action, any blockers, the reading list, and the one human resume note the last session left. That is a print, not a walk: it deliberately does not load the reading list and does not open the plan card. Opening the plan card is the start verb's job, and doing it here is exactly how a read-only verb starts quietly building.
It prints the inventory. Five blocks read from disk: where you left off, the always-loaded core, the dock, the rules that must fire, and the stored project record. Each number comes from the component that owns it. You can point the inventory at a different project directory to report on a tree other than the one you are sitting in, which is how you check what another machine or another checkout actually ships.
If the directory it is pointed at is not a Coldstart project at all, it says so and fails rather than printing zeros. A plausible zero is worse than an error, because a zero reads as an answer.
It reports what is missing and does not fix it. No pointer, no active section, a session block that is a stub or already done, a component absent from disk: one line each, then stop. The only suggestions it is allowed to make are the planning verb and the start verb, because those are the two doors out of "nothing to resume" and neither requires a judgment about your project.
The three rules that make it trustworthy
The value of this verb is entirely in what it refuses to do, so the refusals are explicit rather than emergent.
Read-only. It writes no file. Not the plan, not a note, and specifically not the session mode field. If it wrote the mode, orienting inside a planning session would silently convert it into a build session, and the conversion would be invisible because it happened during an action you thought was passive.
No interpretation. It lists what is on disk. It does not recommend which section to work on next or which file to read first. That judgment is already carried by the plan, and a second opinion offered at the door competes with the plan rather than serving it.
No preamble. Pointer, inventory, stop. There is no summary paragraph, because a summary is an interpretation wearing a helpful voice.
When to use it
Returning after a gap, when you want the state of the project before you decide whether to work on it. Mid-session, when you have lost the thread and want the pointer reprinted without re-announcing a scope. And when you are inspecting a project you did not set up, where "what does this tree actually ship" is the whole question.
Do not use it when you already intend to work. The start verb orients too, and orienting twice is just a slower start.
Limits
It reports the record, not reality. The pointer says what the last close believed. The inventory says what is on disk right now. Neither can tell you whether the work described is still the right work, whether the plan's assumptions still hold, or whether someone else has changed the project since. A confident print of a stale pointer looks exactly like a confident print of a current one.
Being read-only is a property of this verb, not a sandbox around your session. It constrains what this command does. It does not prevent the next thing you type from writing.
The inventory counts what is installed. It does not evaluate whether any of it is useful, correct, or being obeyed.
Next
Neither verb so far produces a plan. That is a separate pass: planning before building.
How current this page is
Checked on 10 August 2026 against the product's current read-only verb and its recorded release state. To ask whether a claim here still holds, or to report one that does not, write to [email protected].