where-were-we

The user has lost the thread of a long session. Give it back in under 20 lines. This is a status read, not a story — nobody needs the narrative of how we got here.

Do not summarize the conversation. A recap of everything said is the failure mode; that is what they already couldn't hold in their head. Report state, not history.

Answer five things, in this order, and stop:

Goal — one sentence: what this session is actually trying to land. Take it from the user's original ask, not from whatever the last ten messages drifted into.

Landed — what is genuinely done, one line each. Commits (with short SHAs), pushes, files written, decisions settled. Cross-check against ground truth: a claim in the transcript that something shipped is not evidence that it shipped. Run git log --oneline, git status, glab mr list as needed — if the conversation and the repo disagree, the repo wins and the disagreement is itself worth a line.

Where we are in the flow — place the work on the chain in the collection README's flow map ("When to reach for which"). That map is the single source of truth — read it, do not restate a chain from memory here. If what you remember disagrees with the README, the README wins. Name the steps that ran and the ones that have not.

Distinguish not yet run from not on the board. If no MR exists, /mr-review is not pending — it is not applicable yet. Listing inapplicable steps as outstanding invents work.

Steps leave different amounts of evidence — do not treat them alike.

• Provable from ground truth: commits and pushes (git log, git status), the MR itself (glab mr list --source-branch), mr-review and fix-review (both post threads to the MR — check its discussions).
• No artifact at all: ship-check, root-cause, validate-plan, prove-the-test. Nothing on disk proves these ran. If the transcript doesn't show one, say "no evidence it ran" — never assert it didn't, and never assert it did.

When this fires as a pre-merge gate check rather than a catch-up, this section is the answer: lead with it, and keep the other four to a line each.

Still open — the part they actually asked for, and the part that needs discipline. An open loop needs evidence: something I said I would do and did not, a finding nobody accepted or rejected, a question I asked that went unanswered, a check that failed, a caveat raised and never resolved. Uncommitted work counts. "We could also…" does not — an idea nobody raised is not an open loop, and padding this section is how the skill becomes noise.

Next — one line. The single most useful thing to do now.

Rules

• Read-only. Report and stop. Do not resume the work, fix the open items, write a handover doc, or commit. If they want any of that they will say so next.
• Brevity is the feature. They asked because there was too much to hold. Bullets, no preamble, no restating the question back at them.
• Nothing open is a real answer. If every loop is closed, say so in one line and give the next action. Do not manufacture loose ends to fill the section.
• If a saved handover doc exists for this branch in .claude/handover/, mention it in one line and point at /handover-resume — do not read it in and re-brief from it.