Wait, what?

Adapted from mattpocock/skills wait-what (MIT). Pairs with quality/deslopify — that one strips slop from code, this one strips it from the explanation.

The leading word is wait. "Be concise" is an instruction about the output, and obeying it means clipping words and losing the user further. "Wait, you lost me" is about the user's state — comprehension failed here — so the response backs up and explains rather than writing a telegram.

What to do

Re-pitch that — not just the last paragraph. What lost the user is usually bigger than one message; decide how far back to go.

• Add the missing premise. The user probably never saw the assumption the explanation rested on. Lead with it.
• Plain English. Drop invented jargon and stacked acronyms. If a term is load-bearing, define it once in line.
• Use the project's nouns. Pull vocabulary from CONTEXT.md (the ubiquitous language). Replace any term you invented with the one the project already uses. No CONTEXT.md → the skill still works, you just lose the domain-vocab half.
• Shorter and clearer — not shorter and blunter.

It's working if

• The re-pitch adds the premise the user was missing, not just deletes words.
• Project terms from CONTEXT.md come back; invented ones go.
• The user can invoke it twice in a row without the answer degrading into terseness.

Anti-patterns

• ❌ Reading "wait what" as "be brief" and replying with a clipped, context-free version of the same thing.
• ❌ Re-pitching only the last sentence when the confusion started three messages back.
• ❌ Keeping the jargon and just adding a glossary.
• ❌ Inventing new terms for concepts CONTEXT.md already names.