Skill Router

Skill Router

Two jobs: help the user find the skill they need, and help me (Claudia) pick the right skill when their request straddles two or more.

Why this exists

The shipped catalog has ~42 user-facing skills. Two common failure modes:

1. Users don't know what's available. They type "morning brief" because they've seen /morning-brief somewhere, but they don't know /inbox-check, /pipeline-review, or /what-am-i-missing exist. Friction.
2. Ambiguous requests fire the wrong skill. "Summarize this" could be summarize-doc, capture-meeting, or file-document depending on what comes next. I sometimes pick the wrong one, the user gets the wrong output, both of us waste a turn.

This skill addresses both.

Surface 1: Discovery

When the user says "what can you do?", "/skills", "show me your skills", "list commands", "what skills do you have":

Respond with a categorized list. Keep it scannable:

**📋 Daily flow**
- /morning-brief         start-of-day digest
- /inbox-check          email triage across configured accounts
- /meeting-prep [person] one-page brief before a call
- /capture-meeting       process meeting notes after a call
- /follow-up-draft       draft a post-meeting thank-you

**📊 Reviews & reflection**
- /weekly-review         end-of-week reflection
- /growth-check          monthly or quarterly self-development
- /what-am-i-missing     overdue, cooling, blind-spot sweep

**💼 Pipeline & business**
- /pipeline-review       active opportunities + stalled items
- /client-health         health check across active clients
- /financial-snapshot    revenue, expenses, cash position

**📚 Knowledge & memory**
- /memory-audit          what I know about an entity
- /memory-health         memory system stats
- /wiki                  write or update a synthesized wiki page
- /map-connections       extract relationships across files
- /deep-context          full-context analysis for important decisions

**✍️ Drafting**
- /draft-reply           general email response
- /summarize-doc         executive summary of a document
- /auto-research         iterate on a draft until it scores well

**🏗 Setup**
- /new-person            create a relationship file
- /new-workspace         new project or client workspace
- /file-document         save a document with entity links
- /ingest-sources        batch-process multiple sources
- /diagnose              troubleshoot memory connectivity

Don't list every skill. List the ones a user is most likely to invoke directly. Internal skills (proactive ones like commitment-detector, pattern-recognizer, risk-surfacer) fire on their own and don't need to be in the discovery list.

If the user asks /skills <topic> or "what skills are about ", filter the list to skills whose names or descriptions match, and explain the cluster. Example for /skills meeting:

Three skills for meetings, in order of when they fire:

- /meeting-prep [person]  → before the call (one-page brief)
- /capture-meeting        → during or after (process notes)
- /follow-up-draft        → after (post-meeting email)

Surface 2: Disambiguation

When the user's request matches 2+ skills, name the candidates briefly and proceed with the canonical one. Don't make the user choose; choose for them, and tell them what you chose.

How to detect ambiguity

A request is ambiguous when:

• The trigger phrase appears in 2+ skill descriptions
• The request is in one of the known overlap clusters (see references/overlap-clusters.md)
• The artifact type is ambiguous (a "transcript" could be a meeting transcript → capture-meeting, or a research interview → ingest-sources, or just a generic document → file-document)

How to disambiguate

Pattern: "Sounds like X or Y. I'll do X. Say so if you wanted Y."

Examples:

User: "Help me draft a follow-up" Claudia: "Sounds like either draft-reply (general response) or follow-up-draft (post-meeting thank-you with meeting context). Was this from a call we had? If yes, follow-up-draft; if not, draft-reply. Defaulting to follow-up-draft since you said 'follow-up'."

User: "Summarize this meeting" Claudia: "I'll use capture-meeting (extracts decisions, commitments, blockers from meeting notes). If you wanted a one-shot prose summary without filing as memories, say summarize-doc instead."

User: "What's going on?" Claudia: "Default for that phrasing is morning-brief. Was that what you wanted, or did you mean /what-am-i-missing (risks and gaps), pipeline-review (deal status), or just an answer about a specific entity? Going with morning-brief."

The pattern: pick the canonical, name the alternative, run.

When NOT to disambiguate

• The request is unambiguous. Don't manufacture options.
• The user has been specific. "Draft a reply to this email" is draft-reply, no need to mention follow-up-draft.
• The disambiguation explanation would be longer than the actual response. For short tasks, just do the canonical thing and let the user redirect.

Overlap clusters (the canonical map)

See references/overlap-clusters.md for the full map. The clusters I check most often:

Skill index integration

The skill-index.json file at skills/skill-index.json is the structured catalog this skill reads. Each entry has:

• name: slug
• description: one-line description
• category: which discovery category the skill falls in (daily, reviews, pipeline, knowledge, drafting, setup, internal)
• canonical_for: list of request patterns where this skill is the canonical choice (used by disambiguation)
• see_also: list of adjacent skills (set in PR3's see-also work)

When skill-router is invoked, it loads skill-index.json and uses these fields. The discovery list above is generated from category. Disambiguation uses canonical_for and see_also.

See also

• agent-dispatcher for routing tasks to subagents (different concept: this is about which Claudia skill fires; agent-dispatcher is about which subagent gets a task)
• capability-suggester for proposing new skills when patterns emerge that current skills don't cover

Open questions for future versions

• Telemetry. Logging which skills fire on which inputs would let me learn over time which routings are wrong and propose corrections via capability-suggester. Not in this version.
• Per-user customization. Some users invoke weekly-review weekly; others never use it. The discovery list should adapt to the user's actual usage over time. Not in this version.
• Skill search by example. "Show me a skill that does X for Y" → semantic search over skill descriptions. Not in this version; today the user filters by keyword via /skills <keyword>.