Skills & Commands

transcend-harness ships five user-invocable skills. Each resolves TRANSCEND_ROOT at startup (plugin root, or the repo root in plain-repo mode) so it can read the CORE library in either install mode.

/transcend-init

The spine. Interviews the developer and generates a bespoke, committed .claude/ harness tailored to the project’s stack — architecture, testing, context/handoff, git workflow, review/quality gates, and specialized workflows.

• Detects the stack with read-only probes, then walks scope, appetite, pillar options, per-rule tiers, and catalog selection.
• Shows a plan preview; nothing is written before you confirm.
• Guards against clobbering: a handcrafted .claude/ stops the run (it recommends /transcend-audit instead), while an existing transcend manifest switches to re-init/upgrade mode where your previous choices become the interview defaults and hand-edited files are preserved.
• Delegates heavy file materialization to the transcend-generator agent.

/transcend-handoff

Write a compact session handoff (<120 lines) so the next session can resume cheaply without re-scanning the codebase. Use before ending a work session, when pausing a task, or when the Stop hook reminds you that changes lack an updated handoff.

Captures the carved Goal, Done, ordered Next steps, blockers, Context pointers, and the Do NOT list — see Context & Handoff.

/transcend-resume

Manually reload the latest handoff into context mid-session (the same one the SessionStart hook auto-loads), plus the current work-state delta (uncommitted changes, recent commits). Use to re-orient after a /compact, after wandering off-task, or to re-read the carved Goal and Do-NOT list. It also flags staleness — e.g. when the work-state delta shows changes the handoff’s “Done” section doesn’t mention.

/transcend-audit

Critique an existing .claude/ harness — whether transcend generated it or not. Read-only by default; checks for:

• drift from the transcend manifest (pristine vs. hand-edited vs. missing files)
• missing pillars and over/under-enforcement
• stale handoffs, oversized CLAUDE.md, broken imports
• unwired specialized workflows

Proposes diff-style improvements and can safe-apply the additive ones: hand-edited or untracked files are never overwritten, only suggested. See Architecture for the merge machinery.

/transcend-catalog

Browse the curated catalog of specialized workflow skills and wire chosen ones into the project’s harness after init. Filters by the project’s stack, guards against writing to hand-edited files, and applies each entry’s wiring idempotently. The entries themselves are documented in the Workflow Catalog.

Generated skills

Beyond these five framework entry points, a harness can generate bespoke skills into your project (.claude/skills/, owned by your repo). The Delivery Pipeline pillar generates two: /pipeline-plan (plan a high-level goal into a reviewable roadmap of issues via the pm agent) and /pipeline-loop (execute one issue end-to-end — the /loop target that grinds the roadmap to done). These are full bespoke skills, distinct from the thin pointer skills the catalog drops in.