# Regrounding Summary

> Make Claude Fable 5 / 5.1's final report readable to someone who saw none of the work. Use for long agentic sessions, overnight runs, and multi-tool tasks — whenever summaries come back as arrow-chain shorthand, invented abbreviations, references to reasoning the reader never saw, dense unbroken paragraphs, or source passages reproduced without quotation marks. Pair with grounded-progress for status content; this skill governs the prose.

- Skill: `kpab/regrounding-summary` (Agent Skill)
- Install (CLI): `npx skillmds@latest add kpab/regrounding-summary`
- Raw SKILL.md: https://api.skillmd.com/api/skills/kpab/regrounding-summary/raw
- Safety review: pending
- Works with: Claude Code, Claude.ai, OpenAI Codex
- Category: Docs & Writing
- Author: kpab (https://skillmd.com/u/kpab)
- Updated: 2026-09-17
- Page: https://skillmd.com/skills/kpab/regrounding-summary

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# Re-grounding Summary

During a long run the model builds private vocabulary — abbreviations, arrow chains, names for intermediate artifacts. Efficient while working; opaque in a final report. The reader is seeing everything for the first time, so the summary must be a re-grounding, not a continuation of the working thread.

## Rules for the final message

- Open with the outcome: one sentence answering "what happened?" or "what did you find?" — the TL;DR the reader would ask for. Detail follows, never leads.
- Complete sentences. No arrow chains (A → B → fails), no hyphen-stacked compound labels, no abbreviations you coined mid-run. If a term you built up is worth keeping, reintroduce it as if new.
- Never reference your own working notes or reasoning as if the reader saw them ("as established above" pointing at tool transcripts).
- Identifiers — files, commits, flags, endpoints — each get their own plain-language clause: what it is, why it matters here.
- Selectivity over compression: shorten by dropping details that wouldn't change the reader's next action, not by squeezing grammar out of the sentences. Readable beats short.
- Short sentences, short paragraphs. When a literal phrase exists, use it; a metaphor or flourish standing in for a direct statement is noise to remove.
- When you reuse a source's wording, mark it as a quotation. Everything else in your own words.
- Close with the one or two things needed from the reader, if any.

## Shape

1. Outcome (1 sentence)
2. What was done / found, in reader-facing language
3. Failures, skips, open questions — stated plainly
4. What's needed from you: ...

## Before the final message

Open the task with one line saying what you're about to do, and keep short updates flowing while you work, so the recap isn't the reader's first contact with the task. Working shorthand between tool calls is otherwise fine — that's thinking out loud. This skill's rules apply the moment you address the human.