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Situation Assessment

A short, honest map of the room: environment, repo health, docs, git history, and what’s actively burning.

Situation is evidence, not mood. Branch dirty? Prod erroring? Agent looping? Milestone empty? Say it in bullets. The output should make the next person (or agent) dangerous in a good way within a minute.

Builders under stress skip the survey and “just fix it,” which is how you get two writers on one file and a half-applied migration. A brief survey is cheaper than a slap later.

  • Read git status, recent log, open PR if any
  • Skim README / AGENTS / product docs once
  • Separate fire (user-impacting, data risk, thrash) from smoke (noise, prefs)
  • Note the quality regime in play (compute / product / generative — see Quality regimes) so the next skill picks the right evidence
  • Dump the whole monorepo into context
  • Treat every warning as Sev-1

idk-now · recon · recon repo · troubleshoot-app · diagnose-bug · tidy-up scan