First Principles Review
Use when the user explicitly asks for first principles, first-principles review, Occam's razor, or when a complex decision has ambiguous goals, competing constraints, repeated fixes, fallback growth, duplicate owners, or architecture/product direction risk.
Writing Plans
Use when you have a spec or requirements for a multi-step task, before touching code
Dispatching Parallel Agents
Use when facing 2+ independent tasks that can be worked on without shared state or sequential dependencies
Requesting Code Review
Use when explicitly requesting an independent code review, after subagent-driven implementation slices, before merging high-risk work, or when verification finds evidence, baseline, architecture, compatibility, or retirement uncertainty that needs reviewer scrutiny.
Systematic Debugging
Use when encountering any bug, test failure, or unexpected behavior, before proposing fixes
Using Git Worktrees
Use when starting feature work that needs isolation from the current workspace, or when an implementation plan should run outside the active working tree.
Test Driven Development
Use when the user explicitly requests strict or test-first TDD, or when the current conversation already contains an explicit `TDD Route: strict` decision from another Aegis workflow.
Executing Plans
Use when you have a written implementation plan to execute in a separate session with review checkpoints
Verification Before Completion
Use when about to claim work is complete, fixed, passing, verified, release-ready, or ready to commit, merge, publish, or hand off.
Receiving Code Review
Use when receiving code review feedback before implementing suggestions, especially when feedback is unclear, risky, disputed, or technically questionable.
Anti Entropy Governance
Use when retiring old logic, collapsing duplicate owners, removing fallbacks, or touching schema, persistence, or source-of-truth boundaries while deciding whether to delete old paths, retain compatibility, or stop for confirmation.
Long Task Continuation
Use when a task is multi-step, may span context resets or sessions, uses subagents, or risks losing state before completion.
Goal Framing
Use when the user explicitly sets an Aegis goal with /aegis-goal, Aegis goal:, or asks to define goal, success evidence, stop condition, or task boundaries before work.
Establishing Project Context
Use when entering a project for the first time, or when the user asks to establish shared language, define domain terms, or create a project glossary.
Finishing A Development Branch
Use when implementation is complete, verification has passed, and the user needs to choose merge, PR, branch cleanup, or follow-up integration handling.
Brainstorming
Use when defining new features, product behavior, UI/component design, architecture choices, contract changes, or ambiguous medium/high-complexity work before implementation.
Update Aegis
Use when the user says `aegis:update`, asks to update or upgrade an installed Aegis method-pack, wants the latest Aegis version, or asks whether Aegis is current on this host.
Communicating Concisely
Use when the user asks for caveman mode, fewer tokens, brief responses, compressed communication, or otherwise explicitly requests a much shorter answer.
Recording Architecture Decisions
Use when the user asks to create, write, update, amend, supersede, or evaluate an ADR, architecture decision record, durable architecture decision, decision log, or baseline sync after architecture-changing work.
Writing Skills
Use when creating new skills, editing existing skills, or verifying skills work before deployment
Subagent Driven Development
Use when executing implementation plans with independent tasks in the current session
Using Aegis
Use when starting a turn or checking Aegis skill routing.