Advise

/advise - Search Skills Before Starting Work

Search the skills registry for relevant past solutions before implementing something new.

Source: Sionic AI Skills Training (Hugging Face) Purpose: Prevent reinventing solutions that already exist

Step 1: Understand User's Goal

Extract the key topic/problem from the user's request:

• What are you trying to accomplish?
• What errors or issues are you facing?
• What domain does this relate to?

Step 2: Search Skills Registry

# Search skill descriptions for keywords
echo "=== Searching skill descriptions ==="
grep -li "[TOPIC_KEYWORD]" ~/.claude/skills/*-skill.md 2>/dev/null

# Search for exact error messages
echo "=== Searching for error messages ==="
grep -rn "[ERROR_MESSAGE]" ~/.claude/skills/ 2>/dev/null

Step 3: Load Relevant Skills

For each matching skill file, read and extract:

1. What worked (from "CORRECT PATTERN" or "Quick Start" sections)
2. What failed (CRITICAL - from "Failed Attempts" tables)
3. Recommended approach (from "Quick Decision Tree" or main content)

Step 4: Provide Recommendation

If Skills Found:

## Relevant Skills Found

**Matching skills**:

- [skill-1-name]: [brief description]

**Recommended approach** (from [skill-name]):
[Copy key steps from the skill]

**Patterns to AVOID** (from Failed Attempts):

- Don't: [failed approach] -> [why it failed]

**Quick Start**:
[Copy the quick start steps from the skill]

If No Skills Match:

## No Existing Skills Match

No skills found for: [topic/error]

**Safe to proceed**: This appears to be a new pattern.

**After solving**: Consider running `/retrospective` to capture learnings as a new skill.

Time to complete: ~2 minutes Value: Prevents 30-60 minutes of reinventing solutions