Instinct Review

/instinct-review - Manage Learned Instincts

$ARGUMENTS

What This Does

Manages the instinct system: project-local behavioral notes that Claude loads at the start of a session.

Instincts are markdown files in .claude/instincts/, loaded at session start by session-start.sh whenever any exist (set AI_TOOLKIT_HOOK_QUIET=1 to suppress).

Commands

List all instincts

/instinct-review --list

Shows all instincts with confidence scores and source sessions.

Review and curate

/instinct-review

Interactive review: shows each instinct and asks promote/remove/keep.

Promote instinct (always apply)

/instinct-review --promote <filename>

Remove instinct

/instinct-review --remove <filename>

Clear all instincts

/instinct-review --clear

How Instincts Work

1. Authoring: Instinct files are written by hand — one markdown file per pattern in .claude/instincts/. There is no automatic session-end extractor today (see When NOT to Use).
2. Storage: .claude/instincts/<pattern-name>.md, each carrying a confidence score (see format below).
3. Loading: At session start, session-start.sh loads every instinct file into context whenever any exist. No instincts on disk means nothing is loaded; set AI_TOOLKIT_HOOK_QUIET=1 to suppress.
4. Curation: Use /instinct-review to list, promote, remove, or clear them.

Instinct Format

# Pattern: [pattern name]
Confidence: 0.85
Sessions: 3
Last seen: 2026-03-25

[Description of the pattern or preference]

Steps

1. Run ls .claude/instincts/ 2>/dev/null || echo "No instincts yet"
2. For each instinct file, read it and display confidence/summary
3. Based on $ARGUMENTS:
   • --list: display table of all instincts
   • --promote <id>: set confidence to 1.0, add "pinned" tag
   • --remove <id>: delete the file
   • --clear: delete all files in .claude/instincts/
   • no args: interactive review of each instinct
4. Report summary of changes made

Rules

• MUST list instincts with their source (session ID or date) so the user can judge provenance — anonymous instincts cannot be curated
• MUST confirm before --clear — this action is irreversible without a backup
• NEVER invent or edit instinct content — this skill curates existing files, it does not generate new ones
• NEVER promote an instinct with confidence < 0.7 without explicit user approval — low-confidence patterns are often one-off noise
• CRITICAL: the user owns the instinct list. Propose changes in interactive mode; apply silently only for explicit --promote, --remove, --clear flags.
• MANDATORY: after any destructive operation, print the deleted or modified filenames so the user has an audit trail

Gotchas

• Instincts live in project-local .claude/instincts/, not in ~/.softspark/ai-toolkit/. Running this skill in a different project sees a different set — do not treat the list as global state.
• Every instinct file loads into session context by default (whenever the directory is non-empty), so each one costs startup tokens. This is why curation matters — prune aggressively and keep the set small.
• Promoted instincts (confidence = 1.0) load into every session's context, costing tokens. Too many pinned instincts bloat startup. Keep ≤10 pinned.
• Instinct files are plain markdown following the format above. If you accumulate many, a --clear and re-author is often cleaner than migrating stale notes after a major toolkit bump.
• The filename (<pattern-name>.md) is the identity used by --promote and --remove. Renaming files manually breaks those flags until the user reopens the review UI.

When NOT to Use

• To auto-extract instincts from a session — not implemented. No Stop hook writes instinct files; author them by hand (or via a future extraction tool). This skill curates existing files, it does not generate them.
• To search past session memory — use /mem-search
• To edit global toolkit memory files — those live in ~/.claude/projects/*/memory/ and are managed by the auto-memory system, not this skill
• To stop instincts from loading — delete the files with --clear, or set AI_TOOLKIT_HOOK_QUIET=1 to suppress all session-start output. There is no extraction process to disable.