wherefore: add the slate skill and wire the sibling skills to it

[DustinVK]

What

Adds a first-class skill for the wherefore/plan/ collection and wires the existing skills around it. The skill was authored as plan; after review the verb was renamed to slate to stop it competing with Claude Code's built-in plan mode for triggering. The collection, the P-NNN scheme, and the frontmatter contract are unchanged: a verb and the collection it writes are allowed to diverge, the same way capture writes log/ and resolve writes questions/.

The slate skill

One verb under /wherefore:slate, four intents detected from the request:

• open: allocate the next P-NNN, break the work into - [ ] checkboxes, never bulk-generate.
• advance: todo -> doing -> done (reopening allowed), bump updated on any write, hand off to capture on a human-driven done.
• drop: status: dropped, requires a dropped_reason or decision_ref, never deletes.
• read: report plan/ only, grouped by status.

Spikes are supported via an optional answers: Q-NNN key (the semantic opposite of question_ref), so an item investigating a question does not render as blocked.

Sibling wiring

slate stays the sole writer of plan/; the others are read-only or hand off:

• capture surfaces plan links for approval and hands off (never writes plan/, never auto-closes on inference).
• ask surfaces spikes alongside open questions.
• resolve reports unblocked and answered items, skips dropped ones.
• supersede flags plan items pointing at a retired decision, read-only.

Driver suppression in both directions (capture drives slate advance, slate drives resolve) prevents handoff loops.

Docs and fixes

• seed scaffolds plan/ and its README on a fresh repo.
• The frontmatter contract is documented consistently across the slate skill, capture, seed, AGENTS.md, and CLAUDE.md; both firm project rules (no em dashes; never delete under a wherefore/ data dir) now appear in all five skills.
• Next-ID allocation in capture and slate now reads the authoritative id from frontmatter instead of scanning filenames, which is how two Q-008s were allocated. The newer duplicate was renumbered to Q-011.
• The main README now documents the skill (skills list, lifecycle note, directory trees).
• AGENTS.md stays the tool-neutral floor: it documents the plan-item collection and contract, not the skill verb, so nothing there names plan or slate.

Version

Plugin bumped 0.1.3 -> 0.2.0. A new skill is an additive feature, so it is a minor bump; the plan -> slate rename is not a public break because the skill was never in a released version.

Dogfood records

This repo's own wherefore/ captures the work: the capture-does-not-write-plan-items and rename-plan-skill-to-slate decisions, plan items P-004 through P-010, and questions Q-010 (capture/supersede boundary) and Q-011.

Validation

claude plugin validate passes for the plugin and marketplace; JSON manifests parse; the four-intent dry-run ran against an out-of-repo scratch dir; zero em dashes; a whole-repo grep confirms no product reference to the skill as plan.

🤖 Generated with Claude Code