Catchup

Catchup

Loads context at session start — reads tracking files, shows progress, and recommends the next action. Read-only except optional native task hydration.

Usage

/catchup

No arguments required. Everything is auto-detected and guided through prompts.

Workflow

1. Read Status Index

• Read external-memory/status.md
• Parse the workstream table
• Categorize each feature as Active (not marked COMPLETE) or Completed
• If status.md is missing: error with guidance ("Create external-memory/status.md with your active workstreams")

2. Select Feature

• If no active workstreams: report completed features, suggest starting new work. Stop here.
• If single active workstream: auto-select it
• If multiple active workstreams, use AskUserQuestion:

  Question: "Which feature are you working on?"
  Header: "Feature"
  Options: [list active features with their current status]
    - "React CRUD Admin Panel" | "Phase 6 — Search Toolbar"
    - "Dark Mode + Filters" | "Planning complete"
  

3. Load Master Plan

• Read the selected feature's master-plan.md (path from status.md)
• Extract and display:
  • Current status — phase and task in progress
  • Phase overview — checklist with completion markers and <-- YOU ARE HERE indicator on active phase
  • Last 3 session log entries — most recent sessions
  • Open blockers — from Blockers section (if any)

4. Check Task Progress

• Identify the active phase directory from master-plan's "Current Status"
• If the phase directory exists in external-memory/tasks/[domain]/:
  • List all task-*.md files
  • For each task, parse ## Acceptance Criteria:
    • All [x] → complete
    • Mixed → in progress (show X/Y)
    • All [ ] → pending
  • Display per-task progress with indicators:
    • [x] for complete
    • [~] for in progress (with criteria count)
    • [ ] for pending
  • Mark the first in-progress or pending task with <-- IN PROGRESS or <-- NEXT
• If no task directory exists: note this for recommendations

5. Check Git State

• Run git branch --show-current to get current branch
• Compare with expected branch from status.md
• If mismatch: warn but do NOT switch branches

  ⚠ Branch mismatch: on 'main' but feature expects 'claude-preparation'
  

• Run git status --short to check for uncommitted changes
• If uncommitted changes exist: note them, suggest reviewing

  ⚠ Uncommitted changes detected (X files). Consider reviewing before starting.
  

6. Offer Native Task Hydration

Scan all task directories across all domains (external-memory/tasks/*/phase-*/) for task files. If task files exist, use AskUserQuestion:

If active phase has task files:

Question: "Recreate native task tracking from file state?"
Header: "Task Tracking"
Options:
  - "Hydrate active phase (Recommended)" | "Hydrate [active-phase-name] (N tasks)"
  - "Hydrate different phase" | "Choose from all available phase directories"
  - "Skip" | "File-based tracking only"

If active phase has no task files but other phases do:

Question: "Recreate native task tracking from file state?"
Header: "Task Tracking"
Options:
  - "Hydrate a phase" | "Choose from available phase directories"
  - "Skip" | "File-based tracking only"

If "Hydrate different phase" or "Hydrate a phase" selected: Show a follow-up AskUserQuestion listing all available phase directories:

Question: "Which phase to hydrate?"
Header: "Phase"
Options: [list each directory with task counts]
  - "backend/phase-01-setup" | "5 tasks (2 completed, 1 in_progress, 2 pending)"
  - "frontend/phase-01-components" | "3 tasks (0 completed)"

Hydration logic (same for any selected phase):

1. Read overview.md in the selected directory to get task list
2. For each task file, parse ## Acceptance Criteria checkboxes to determine status:
   • All [x] → status: completed
   • Some [x] → status: in_progress
   • All [ ] → status: pending
3. Call TaskCreate for each task (subject from # Task: header, description from ## Objective, activeForm in present continuous)
4. Parse ## Dependencies > ### Tasks and set blockedBy relationships via TaskUpdate
5. Update task files with ## Native Task section containing the new ID
6. If existing ## Native Task section found, overwrite with fresh ID
7. Report: "Hydrated N tasks (X completed, Y in_progress, Z pending)"

If "Skip": proceed without hydration

7. Recommend Next Action

Based on the current state, recommend one of:

8. Report

Display a concise summary formatted like:

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
[Feature Name]
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Status: Phase [N] — [Phase Name]
Branch: [current branch] [✓ matches | ⚠ expected: X]

Phase Progress:
  [x] Phase 1-N (complete)
  [ ] Phase N+1 - [Name]    <-- YOU ARE HERE
  [ ] Phase N+2 - [Name]

Phase [N+1] Tasks:
  [x] task-01-name               (5/5)
  [~] task-02-name               (2/4)  <-- IN PROGRESS
  [ ] task-03-name               (0/6)

Recent Sessions:
  [date] | [summary]
  [date] | [summary]
  [date] | [summary]

Recommended: [action]

What /catchup Reads vs Modifies

Edge Cases

Examples

Single active feature

> /catchup

Reading status.md...
  Active: React CRUD Admin Panel (Phase 6)
  Completed: Data Model Entities, Consistency Backlog

Loading master plan...

━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━
React CRUD Admin Panel
━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━━

Status: Phase 6 — Search Toolbar with Text Search
Branch: claude-preparation ✓

Phase Progress:
  [x] Phase 1-5 (complete)
  [ ] Phase 6 - Search Toolbar    <-- YOU ARE HERE
  [ ] Phase 7 - Faceted Filters

Phase 6 Tasks:
  [x] task-01-useDebounce-hook       (5/5)
  [~] task-02-data-table-toolbar     (2/4)  <-- IN PROGRESS
  [ ] task-03-wire-search-list-pages (0/6)

Recent Sessions:
  2026-02-12 | Phase 5 COMPLETE. ThemeProvider + ModeToggle. build passes.

[AskUserQuestion: Task Tracking]
> User selects: "Hydrate"

Hydrated 3 tasks (1 completed, 1 in_progress, 1 pending)

Recommended: Continue task-02-data-table-toolbar.md

Multiple active features

> /catchup

Reading status.md...
  Active: React CRUD Admin Panel, Dark Mode + Filters

[AskUserQuestion: Feature]
> User selects: "Dark Mode + Filters"

Loading master plan...
[displays status report]

Recommended: Run /task-planning-workflow to create tasks for Phase 6

Hydrating a different phase

> /catchup

[... status report ...]

[AskUserQuestion: Task Tracking]
> User selects: "Hydrate different phase"

[AskUserQuestion: Phase]
  - "backend/phase-01-setup" | "5 tasks (2 completed, 1 in_progress, 2 pending)"
  - "backend/phase-02-auth" | "3 tasks (0 completed)"
> User selects: "backend/phase-02-auth"

Hydrated 3 tasks (0 completed, 0 in_progress, 3 pending)

Recommended: Continue task-02-data-table-toolbar.md

No active work

> /catchup

Reading status.md...
  No active workstreams found.
  Completed: Data Model Entities, Consistency Backlog, React CRUD Admin Panel

Recommended: Start new work — create a plan in plan mode.