knackpack

Challenge and clarify requirements before planning or implementing a software change — feature requests, bug reports, specifications, tickets, and proposed solutions. Finds missing outcomes, ambiguous behavior, conflicting constraints, hidden assumptions, unsafe defaults, and untestable acceptance criteria, asks the few questions that matter, and produces a requirements brief with explicit decisions and unresolved blockers. Use only when the user asks to challenge, clarify, or pressure-test requirements, not automatically for every request.

Save the current task's state to CHECKPOINT.md before the user compacts the conversation, so the next context picks up exactly where this one stopped instead of relying on the automatic summary. Use when the user is about to compact, worries the conversation has grown too long, or asks to save where things stand. It writes one temporary file and doesn't touch the memory system.

Explain what was just implemented in this conversation in plain English for a junior dev, so the user can understand the full picture and make a decision. Default output is exactly two paragraphs; the argument "more" gives a longer, detailed version. Not for questions about how existing code works when nothing was changed in this conversation; answer those directly.

Generate a high-level, self-contained code-review handoff and save it as HANDOFF.md in a private temporary folder outside the repository, so the user can pass a single file path to another coding agent acting as principal code reviewer, which writes its review to a file. Summarizes recent changes, the motivation, approach, alternatives, verification, risk, and what the reviewer should scrutinize. Use when the user wants a handoff or writeup to give another agent or person, not when they ask for a review here, which knackpack's reviewer agents do.

Run every knackpack reviewer that applies to one target together, then merge what they report into one triaged report: duplicates grouped under one ID with every source kept, severities reconciled, each serious merged finding checked once by the adjudicator, including whether its fix works, and every issue sorted into fix now, decision needed or won't fix, with how each fix would be verified. Report-only: it never edits the project's files, and it saves the report to a private temporary folder and gives the path. Use only when the user asks to run several or all of knackpack's reviewers together, or for one review by every reviewer, never automatically after a change; for a single reviewer, start that reviewer instead. It starts many agents, and on a large code base it can use more than a million tokens.

Create a repository-grounded implementation plan for a feature, bug fix, refactor, migration, or integration, or revise an existing plan. Turns requirements into small, ordered, verifiable work packages with explicit dependencies, security obligations, validation, rollout, and recovery, and challenges infeasible approaches and unnecessary scope. Use when the user asks for an implementation plan, not automatically before every change.

Research an engineering question well enough to support a decision: check a claim against primary sources, compare technologies or approaches, test whether an approach will work or scale, or find why something performs badly, using the repository, current documentation and small, reproducible experiments. Ends with a recommendation that names its evidence, tradeoffs and remaining uncertainty, which may be to keep what exists. Use it whenever the user asks whether to adopt, replace, upgrade or remove a dependency, technology or design, which option to choose, whether a switch is safe, or whether an approach will work or scale, even if they never say research, and whenever they ask to research, compare, evaluate or prototype. Not for quick lookups that one source answers, or for carrying out a change already decided.

Keeps a private record of what the developer and Claude have agreed in this session (requirements in the developer's own words, assumptions, open questions, suggestions and what-ifs that weren't agreed, and what has been built) and reads every new message against it, so a question doesn't become an instruction and a correction doesn't erase other requirements. Knackpack's session-start hook loads it automatically; run it yourself only where hooks are blocked, or to see the agreement, continue earlier work, or stop tracking.

Write, update or review a codebase's engineering documents: READMEs, PRDs, ADRs, design docs, architecture overviews and diagrams, runbooks, API docs, PR descriptions, changelogs, migration guides, incident reviews, and agent instructions such as CLAUDE.md. Gives each reader what they need to understand, decide or act in as few words as that takes, without cutting constraints, warnings, failure behavior or uncertainty. Use it whenever you write or edit one of these documents, including a README or docs update after a code change, and when tightening wordy or AI-sounding text or checking a document against the code. Not for a small fix such as a typo, a broken link or a version number, or for code comments, commit messages or chat replies.