Thinking Out Loud

Thinking Out Loud

Maintain a durable project-local record of sanitized working notes. This skill exists to preserve useful investigation context without turning routine work into a mandatory artifact.

This is not a private chain-of-thought dump.

Artifact

When this skill is active, ensure a thinking.md file exists in the target project.

Path selection:

1. If the target repository follows Agentic Rails and an active implementation-plan folder is identifiable, write thinking.md in that folder.
2. Otherwise write thinking.md in the target project's context or documentation folder.
3. Load references/path-selection.md if the correct location is not obvious.

Initial content may be:

# Thinking Notes

Capture useful engineering notes here. This is not a private chain-of-thought dump.

## Investigation Notes

## Discovered Constraints

## Useful Observations

## Things To Revisit

Operating Model

1. Identify the target project root and artifact path.
2. Ensure thinking.md exists before substantive work begins.
3. Work normally, appending concise notes only when they will help a later human or agent.
4. Record source-grounded investigation paths, constraints, observations, and revisit triggers.
5. Keep notes sanitized. Summarize reasoning outcomes and evidence, not hidden chain-of-thought.
6. Preserve existing notes unless the user explicitly asks for cleanup or the agent is correcting its own factual mistake.

Good Entries

• Investigation: context/agenticworkflow.md - found that optional artifacts are skill-gated.
• Constraint: Do not write thinking.md unless this skill is active.
• Observation: The implementation plan uses folder-based Implementation Plan context, so local artifacts should live beside plan.md when possible.
• Revisit: Validate path-selection behavior in a non-Agentic-Rails repository before installing globally.

Do Not Record

• Private chain-of-thought or step-by-step hidden reasoning.
• Generic status updates that already belong in chat or an implementation log.
• Speculation without a source, decision, or follow-up.
• Routine command output unless it supports a useful observation.

Validation

• thinking.md exists in the selected path.
• The file contains only sanitized, useful notes.
• Optional sibling artifacts such as complaining.md or evidence.md were referenced only if they exist or are relevant.