decision-tracker_skill

Overview

This skill provides git-powered state awareness for conversational development sessions. It tracks in-session changes, between-session diffs, and historical decisions so the assistant avoids stale context and duplicated work. The system auto-activates for state queries and before potentially conflicting file operations.

How this skill works

It inspects git status, diffs, and logs to build a lightweight differential summary at session start and on demand. A PreToolUse hook checks file state before edits and a SessionStart hook injects changes since the last session. Decisions, research, and plans are stored in a compact decisions.yaml and queried selectively to load only relevant context.

When to use it

• When asking “what changed since last session?” or “show me what happened”.
• Before editing or writing files to avoid conflicts with external changes.
• Before starting research, planning, or making a decision to reuse prior work.
• After the user reports external commits or edits.
• When you want a concise differential summary instead of reloading entire project context.

Best practices

• Rely on the PreToolUse hook rather than manually running git commands before edits.
• Always query decisions.yaml for research, plans, or decisions before starting new work.
• Treat research entries as expirable (e.g., 6 months) and re-run only when expired.
• Use the manual session-status script for a full snapshot when needed.
• Load only the relevant entries from decisions.yaml to minimize token usage.

Example use cases

• User asks “what files did we work on?” → run session-status and summarize commits and changed files.
• Attempting to Edit a file after external change → PreToolUse warns and suggests re-reading the file.
• Starting research on a topic → query decisions.yaml and reuse existing findings if available.
• Beginning a planning session → check for active plans to continue existing work instead of recreating.
• After a user commits changes outside the assistant → run session-status and report the differential.