Side Quest

Side Quest

A thought that arrives mid-flow has two bad exits: chase it (lose the thread) or suppress it (and risk losing it or returning to it repeatedly). This skill builds the third exit: park it in one line, keep working, and collect the finished work at your next natural break.

The trust contract, before any mechanics: a parked thought can never be silently lost, and a completion mark can never lie. The moment either breaks once, the user's mind stops releasing thoughts and the tool is dead. Every rule below serves that contract; when in doubt, protect the contract, not the feature.

Step 1 — Capture and triage (≤5 seconds of the user's attention)

Explicit markers fire immediately, no questions: sq: / side quest: / background this / park this / not now but: / 支线 / 先别进主线 / 后台弄. Inferred phrasings ("btw can you also…", "哦对了那个…回头弄", "…anyway keep going") get ONE line — "→ background as a side quest? (default: handle it now in-thread)" — and ambiguity resolves to the main thread. Capture never asks a second question.

Before dispatching, triage the thought — most "side quests" are something else:

Multiple quests in one message ("sq×3: …") = one merged ledger entry set, one combined confirmation line.

Step 2 — Ledger first (write-ahead; the non-negotiable)

BEFORE spawning anything, append to the inbox's _INBOX.md:

| date-time | user's words, VERBATIM | brief (1 line) | state |

States: captured → dispatched → done | failed | partial | queued. Every terminal state produces a receipt. If a session dies, orphaned dispatched entries are announced the next time this skill loads (any sq marker, "sq list", or an inbox mention) — after reconciling with the inbox first: inspect any deliverable against the stored brief and check available agent status. A file alone may be a partial write: mark done only when its content and completion evidence satisfy the brief; otherwise preserve it as partial or keep a live dispatch running. If agent status is unavailable, record that uncertainty before retrying. Announcing a false failure breaks the same contract as silence. A quest may never end without a durable trace. The verbatim words are sacred: never retitle the user's thought; they find it by their own words, not by your summary.

Step 3 — The brief (curated context, not zero context)

The laziest real utterances are deictic — "this pattern", "that chart lib", "刚才第三段". A background agent given only the raw words will guess, and confidently. So the MAIN agent — the one holding the conversation — pays the serialization cost, never the user:

• Resolve every pronoun and reference into a self-contained brief, ≤5 lines: the thought itself, what it refers to (named explicitly), what the user was doing, and the expected shape of the deliverable.
• For repo/code quests, add a static environment fingerprint (≤10 lines: cwd, branch, stack facts from the project's own docs). Environment facts are not contamination; conversation history is. The side agent receives the brief and fingerprint ONLY — never the transcript.
• The confirmation line echoes the brief's one-line reading, not the raw words — echo-as-verification, no question asked: ⚡ sq #4 "check webhook retry dedup (billing service, src/hooks)" — say "撤"/"cancel" to pull it back. Folder names, file names, and ALL receipt/confirmation templates follow the conversation's language (the cancel word too: 撤 for Chinese, cancel for English).
• sq (isolated): … forces a zero-brief dispatch for the rare quest the user wants fully sealed.

If the reference cannot be resolved from context, do NOT ask — ledger it with the note "context insufficient; interpreted literally" and dispatch the literal reading. A wrong draft plus an honest note beats an interrogation.

Step 4 — Execution rules (for the side agent)

Rule transport: the side agent never reads this file — every dispatch prompt embeds Step 4's rules verbatim beneath the brief. A rule not in the prompt does not exist for the side agent.

• Draft-only, iron rule. No sends, no publishes, no PRs/issues, no installs into shared environments, no purchases, no deletions — anywhere, ever. An actionable quest ships as a draft whose first line is DRAFT — NOT SENT / NOT APPLIED. The trigger word requests relief, not authority.
• Workspace law. Never touch the user's working tree, git state, config, or anything the main session stands on. Repo quests run in a fresh git worktree (placed under ~/side-quests/worktrees/<slug>, never inside the user's repo) from a clean ref; the deliverable is a branch name plus one merge command. Writes are permitted only inside the inbox directory and the quest worktree.
• Assume forward, assumptions on top. No questions back — make the call, and open the deliverable with an ASSUMPTIONS block (≤5, each with "if wrong → discard section N"). When confidence is genuinely low, ship two small versions or an honest partial — never dress a guess as a completion.
• Output is proportional to input. A two-word quest gets at most one page. No unrequested expansions; over-delivery raises the cost of opening the inbox, and an unopened inbox kills the tool.
• Run cheap and polite. Default to a lighter model/effort than the main thread; at most 2 quests run concurrently (others wait as queued); side quests must never starve the main session's rate limits — the first dispatch each session notes once: "runs in background — shares your usage limits."

Step 5 — Receipts (buffered, honest, verdict-bearing)

• Dispatch confirmation: one fixed-format line, immediately (Step 3's echo).
• Completion/failure receipts never interrupt: they queue silently and attach to the next natural boundary — the assistant's next reply after the user speaks. Never mid-generation, never as a standalone ping. If the harness forces a render turn when a background result arrives, output nothing beyond a minimal one-line ack.
• A receipt carries: the user's verbatim words, a one-line verdict, and the highest-risk assumption: ✅ sq "stripe retries dedup?" — yes, dedupes on event_id (webhook.ts:41); assumed billing-service repo. Note in inbox. Answer-shaped quests (yes/no, a number, a flag) are CLOSED by the receipt line itself; the file is optional.
• Failures are receipts too: ⚠️ sq "X" failed (rate limit) — your words are safe in _INBOX.md; say "sq retry" to redispatch.
• sq list shows the queue with states; sq kill <n> cancels; sq redo "<X>": <correction> redispatches with the stored brief plus the correction — no re-explaining.

Step 6 — Inbox and resurfacing (anti-graveyard)

• Default location ~/side-quests/ — never colonize the Desktop uninvited; the user may configure any folder (stored in ~/side-quests/config.md). Folder names, file names, and ALL receipt/confirmation templates follow the conversation's language (the cancel word too: 撤 for Chinese, cancel for English).
• Files are named YYMMDD--<slug of the user's verbatim words>.md, never agent-invented titles, never bare timestamps.
• Deliverables always land inside the inbox (a staging/ subfolder for files meant to move elsewhere); the receipt includes the one-line move command — writing to user-specified locations outside the inbox stays with the user or the main thread.
• Deliverable header, fixed: verbatim words · captured-at + what the main thread was · TL;DR ≤3 lines · ASSUMPTIONS · suggested next step. The reader decides in one screen whether to read on.
• _INBOX.md is the living index (date | words | state | three-word result | file). At the skill's next load in a new session — a natural boundary, not an interruption — if unread results exist, print a quiet one-line-per-item digest with ages, plus "say 'archive all' to clear". No unread counters mid-session, no guilt language, no reminders that interrupt work: the inbox must be there when the user wants it, never demand attention for itself.
• Results untouched for 7 days move silently to archive/ (marked in the index, never deleted). The pile must not be able to grow into a reproach.

Degraded environments

• No background-agent capability (some engines/harnesses): capture, triage, ledger, and brief still run in full — they are the product's core. The quest sits as queued; offer "run it inline at your next break, or leave it queued". Never pretend it is running.
• No disk access: emit the ledger line and brief as a copyable block and say where to save it. Never drop a thought silently.

Boundaries

• The dispatch turn belongs to the main thread: acknowledge in one line and continue the user's actual work — never let parking a thought become the interruption it exists to prevent.
• This skill is not a scheduler, not a to-do app, and not a way to launder irreversible actions through a background agent.
• If the completion mark's honesty ever conflicts with looking productive, honesty wins. A trustworthy ledger of unfinished quests beats a gallery of confident garbage.